Alumnus Everett Berry wins annual Eaton Award
Everett Berry is the winner of the 2020 Eaton Award in Design Excellence. This unique award program recognizes outstanding work in the field of design by recent Purdue ECE alumni.
Berry is the founder and CEO of visitorX (formerly known as Perceive) -- a technology company focused on making camera software that helps frontline teams achieve their goals. Berry and his team designed an affordable multi-camera people-tracking system which is 1000X cheaper than anything else commercially available. They have focused on anonymity, ease of install, streaming data architectures, simple edge devices, cloud computing, and unique contributions in 3D reconstruction to enable this.
As part of this design work, Berry has written and received $1.4-million in National Science Foundation (NSF) research grants, including NSF SBIR Phase I, Phase II, and TECP grants. Perceive has also been accepted into the Alchemist Accelerator program in Silicon Valley, Berry has been nominated for a Mira Award for Rising Entrepreneur, named a Pioneer winner in Silicon Valley, received a Black Award from Purdue and Elevate Ventures, and has two patent applications pending
Berry received his B.S. in computer engineering from Purdue University in 2016. While studying at Purdue, he performed research with Dr. Yung-Hsiang Lu on multimedia systems and distributed video analysis. Berry and Lu co-authored several papers about their work and its applications and subsequently founded visitorX.
In industry, Berry has worked on camera technology and big data solutions. At Qualcomm, as part of the Android camera power and performance team, he developed tools for profiling the camera subsystem. While at Hewlett Packard Vertica, Berry implemented an experimental encoding algorithm for efficiently storing large string data types in the Vertica Analytic Database.
The Eaton Award in Design Excellence was established in 2001 with a generous gift from Jim and Shirley Eaton of Palo Alto, California. Jim Eaton earned each of his degrees (BSEE '58, MSEE '63, and PhD '67) from Purdue, and his father was a well- known faculty member in the School from 1942 to 1967.
Dr. Eaton's motivation for creating this award comes from his three decades of leading design work during his career at Hewlett Packard. The Eaton award encourages promising young engineers to continue their work in design by recognizing their early achievements in the field.