Visual tech visionaries honored with innovation awards
Humans have been fascinated with light and optics since prehistoric times, when the first camera obscura effects — likely a pinhole in an animal hide — was used to project upside down images onto cave walls. Today, visual technologies connect us in most facets of everyday life, in our homes, our places of work and our classrooms.
Lina Karam, an electrical engineering professor at Arizona State University’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, thought it was time to acknowledge the visionaries who have created those transformative technologies and media platforms — medical imaging, video gaming, virtual reality, 3-D imagery and video streaming on a wide range of computing and personal devices. So, she introduced the Visual Innovation Award for this year’s IEEE International Conference on Image Processing.
Karam, who chaired this year’s conference, launched the award as part of a new innovation program, which includes a technology showcase and a series of workshops presented by industry.