Richard G. Baraniuk is the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Rice University, a member of the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and Machine Learning research groups, and director/founder of OpenStax.
Prof. Baraniuk is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and IEEE. He has received the DOD Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow Award (National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow), the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award, and the IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal. He holds 28 U.S. and four foreign patents that have been licensed to a large multinational corporation and a startup.
His PhD and postdoc alums have gone on to join the faculty at top research universities worldwide, including Baylor College of Medicine, Carnegie Mellon, Colorado School of Mines, Columbia, Cornell, ENS-Lyon, Ecole Fédérale Polytechnique de Lausanne, Georgia Tech (5), Iowa State, KU Leuven, Maryland, McGill, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina State University (2), and UMass Amherst, as well as to positions in a range of startups and industrial research labs.
Prof. Baraniuk grew up in Winnipeg, Canada, the world’s coldest city with a population of more than 600,000 (and home of K-tel and The Guess Who). He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Manitoba in 1987, an master’s degree in 1988 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a PhD degree in 1992 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, all in electrical engineering. In 1986, he was a research engineer with Omron Tateisi Electronics in Kyoto, Japan.
While at the University of Illinois, he held a joint appointment with the CERL Sound Group of the Computer-based Education Research Lab (CERL, developer of the PLATO system) and the Coordinated Science Laboratory. After spending 1992-1993 at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, he joined the faculty of Rice University in Houston, Texas. He spent a sabbatical at Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Télécommunications in Paris in 2001 and EPFL in Switzerland in 2002.
Prof. Baraniuk’s research interests in signal processing and machine learning lie primarily in new theory and algorithms involving low-dimensional models. His research on compressive sensing, multiscale natural image modeling using wavelet-domain hidden Markov models, and time-frequency analysis has been funded by NSF, DARPA, ONR, AFOSR, AFRL, ARO (including 2 MURIs), IARPA, DOE, NGA, EPA, NATO, the Texas Instruments Leadership University Program, and several companies. He was a member of the DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study Group from 2008-2011.