IEEE Awards Booklet - 2022 - 10

2022 IEEE MEDALS
IEEE Theodore W. Hissey Outstanding
Young Professional Award
Sponsored by the IEEE Photonics Society,
IEEE Power & Energy Society, and
IEEE Young Professionals
IEEE Edison Medal
Sponsored by Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
Edhem (Eddie) Cˇustovic´
Alan Bovik
For leadership in the empowerment and
development of technology professionals
globally
Edhem (Eddie) Čustović is dedicated to empowering individuals
and growing local economies while delivering the scientific
advancements of our finest minds for the benefit of future generations
using the powers of engineering, education, networking, an
entrepreneurial mindset, and the spirit of positive change. Born in
Bosnia & Herzegovina and having lived for extended periods in
Switzerland and Germany before migrating to Australia, his multicultural
background, multilingualism, and " borderless " approach
to work enables him to take a politically and culturally sensitive
perspective on life, volunteer roles, and professional career. In
2015, with the culmination of first-hand experiences and passion
to help those in need, he founded the Bosnia & Herzegovina
Futures Foundation, whose vision is to break down ethnic division
in his homeland through a simple approach of empowering
youth through education, technology access, and leadership
development. Čustović is widely credited for changing how the
1.5-million-strong Bosnia & Herzegovina diaspora are viewed by
the residents of the same country through the diaspora industry
mentoring program. Čustović is highly regarded for the drive and
leadership that have led him to become one of the youngest senior
leadership and board members within IEEE, where he currently
serves as the chair of the Industry Engagement Committee.
He is a tireless ambassador for STEM education and has worked
to bridge the gap between primary/secondary/university education
and industry. He was the engineering project coordinator
for the Learn, Access, Experience Professions (LEAP) program
funded by the Australian government to accelerate the participation
of regional, low socioeconomic status, and minority participation
in STEM higher education. Under his leadership the
program excelled, reaching more than 10,000 students in over
200 state schools. He wholeheartedly has a deep commitment to
making positive change for the world and believes the intersection
between scientific innovation and human empowerment is
where we can really " disrupt the future. "
An IEEE Senior Member, IEEE-HKN Member, and recipient
of the 2015 IEEE MGA Young Professionals Achievement Award,
Čustović is director of the La Trobe Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Foundry (LIEF) at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria,
Australia.
Scope: For contributions to the technical community and IEEE
fields of interest.
For pioneering high-impact scientifi c and
engineering contributions leading to the
perceptually optimized global streaming
and sharing of visual media
Alan Bovik has singularly pioneered the use of visual neuroscience
to create video engineering technologies that control the
quality of most broadcast television, streaming, and social media
pictures and videos. For decades he has conducted groundbreaking,
large-scale, psychometric studies of visual quality, collecting
millions of subjective judgments from tens of thousands of human
volunteers. Using these resources, he created foundational theories
of retino-cortical distortion perception and breakthrough neurostatistical
models of how distortions affect visual signaling in the
brain. He and his students used these theories to create quantitative
predictors of visual quality more accurate than any prior
methods, with natural simplicities easily translated into efficient
digital algorithms, allowing hundreds of millions of viewers to enjoy
perceptually optimized viewing experiences daily, significantly
contributing to more efficient and ecological global bandwidth
consumption. His early breakthroughs included the Structural
Similarity (SSIM) and Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) visual
quality measurement tools. SSIM pervades social and streaming
media systems worldwide; most of the pictures and videos that
are socially shared every day are quality controlled using SSIM.
VIF has similar penetration and is used to monitor and control
the encode quality of a large percentage of videos streamed globally.
He also developed accurate and practical " blind " visual quality
models, using new models of neuro-statistical distances between
distorted and distortion-free visual signals. His globally marketed
BRISQUE and NIQE blind quality engines are widely used for
source inspection of streaming and social video uploads, camera
capture optimization, and remote video transcoding in the cloud.
His inventions monitor and control most U.S. Internet traffic and
affect nearly every form of visual media. He accomplished this by
deeply engaging the global streaming and social media industries
to adopt his ideas, thereby injecting the principles of visual neuroscience
throughout the global Internet.
An elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering,
IEEE Fellow, recipient of the 2019 IEEE Fourier Award
for Signal Processing and a Primetime Emmy®
Award for Outstanding
Achievement in Engineering Development, Bovik is the
Cockrell Family Regents Endowed Chair Professor at the University
of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.
Scope: For a career of meritorious achievement in electrical science,
electrical engineering, or the electrical arts.
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IEEE Awards Booklet - 2022

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