ECE alumnus wins 2018 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award
![Suhas Sreehari](./sreehari-ieee-paper/sreehari-portrait.jpg)
ECE alumnus Suhas Sreehari has won the 2018 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award. Sreehari (PhD ECE ’17) was a student of Charles Bouman, the Showalter Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Purdue. He earned the recognition for the paper entitled "Plug-and-Play Priors for Bright Field Electron Tomography and Sparse Interpolation" which details work done in Bayesian estimation imaging while Sreehari was a PhD student.
“In Prof. Bouman’s lab, we work on a variety of computational imaging research projects,” says Sreehari. “In particular, I was involved in the development of Plug & Play priors — a distributed Bayesian optimization framework that allows for incorporation of cutting-edge machine learning algorithms as well as powerful demolishing operators as prior models in regularized reconstruction. This is the first time anyone has been able to introduce Bayesian prior models that are not constrained to be represented as cost/loss functions. Applications can range from image super-resolution and tomography to natural language processing.”
The Young Author Best Paper Award honors the author(s) of a paper on a subject related to the Society’s technical scope and appearing in one of the Society’s publications. Shreehari’s paper was co-authored by S. V. Venkatakrishnan (phD ECE ’14), Brendt Wohlberg, Gregery T. Buzzard, Lawrence F. Drummy, Jeffrey P. Simmons, and Charles A. Bouman and was published in IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging, Volume 2, Number 4, December 2016.
“I had seen Plug & Play take off rapidly in the signal processing community,” says Sreehari, “but it is still such a surprise and a great honor to be chosen for this unique, global award!”
The award will be presented at the 2019 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing held in Brighton, UK from May12-19, 2019.