Professor Ramalingam "Rama" Chellappa, an ECE alumnus and OECE recipient, has been awarded the K.S. Fu Prize from the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). The biennial prize is given to a person in recognition of an outstanding technical contribution to the field of pattern recognition, and consists of a cash amount and inscribed certificate. The prize will be presented at the 21st ICPR in Tsukuba Science City, Japan on November 11-15, 2012.

Professor Chellappa received his MSEE and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Purdue in 1978 and 1981, respectively.

During the last 29 years, he has published numerous book chapters and peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. He has co-authored and edited books on MRFs, face and gait recognition and collected works on image processing and analysis. His current research interests are face and gait analysis, markerless motion capture, 3D modeling from video, image and video-based recognition and exploitation, compressive sensing, and hyper spectral processing. Professor Chellappa served as the associate editor of four IEEE Transactions and as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He is serving a two-year term as the President of IEEE Biometrics Council.

Professor Chellappa has received several research and teaching awards and recognition from IEEE Signal Processing Society, IEEE Computer Society, and the University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the International Association for Pattern Recognition, and the Optical Society of America.

He is currently the Head of ECE at the University of Maryland, College Park.