Short Bio:

Prakash Ishwar received the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1996 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1998 and 2002, respectively. After two years as a post-doctoral researcher in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the Faculty of Boston University where he is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Division of Systems Engineering and an Affiliate Professor with the Department of Computer Science in the College of Arts and Sciences. His expertise is in information theory, information-theoretic security, machine learning, statistical signal processing, and visual information analysis and processing. His current research centers on data science to advance statistical and computational tools for learning and inference problems using both model-based and data-driven methods.

He is a recipient of a 2005 NSF CAREER Award, a co-recipient of the AVSS’10 Best Paper Award, a co-winner of the ICPR’10 Aerial View Activity Classification Challenge, and co-author of the Student Best Paper Award in the NIPS’14 Workshop on Analysis of Rank Data. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, received numerous grants, served as the Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing for two terms, and served as an elected member of the IEEE Signal Processing Theory and Methods (SPTM) Technical Committee and the IEEE Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IMDSP) Technical Committee.

Education:

Positions Held:

Honors and Awards:

  • 2024 MLSP Best Paper Award for paper co-authored with Thuan Nguyen, Ruijie Jiang, Shuchin Aeron, and Donald Brown titled “On Neural Collapse in Contrastive Learning With Imbalanced Datasets” (34th IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing, London, UK, Sep. 2024).
  • 2023-24 Hariri Institute Award, Boston University. Focused Research Program on First Trip to Mars: How to Pack Light.
  • 2023-24 Hariri Institute, Digital Health Initiative Award, Boston University. Focused Research Program on Novel Data Science and AI Approaches for Brain Health and Brain Disease.
  • Co-author of 2022 AEJMC Top Method Paper: “Community Detection of the Framing Element Network: Proposing and Assessing a New Computational Framing Analysis Approach,” with Yanru Jiang, Sha Lai (doctoral advisee), Lei Guo, Margrit Betke, and Derry Wijaya, in the 105th AEJMC Annual Conference, Communication Theory and Methodology Division, Detroit, MI, Aug. 2022.
  • Winner of PETS 2021 Through-Foliage Detection and Tracking Challenge at the 2021 IEEE Int. Conf. Advanced Video and Signal-Based Surveillance, for joint work with Mertcan Cokbas (doctoral advisee) and Janusz Konrad.
  • 2018 Outstanding Mentor Award, Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), Boston University.
  • 2018 Outstanding Mentor Award, Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), Boston University.
  • 2017 Google Faculty Research Award, with Margrit Betke and Lei Guo.
  • 2016 Hariri Institute Research Award, Boston University.
  • Co-author of 2014 NIPS Workshop Student Best Paper Award: Weicong Ding (doctoral advisee), Prakash Ishwar, and Venkatesh Saligrama, “A Topic Modeling Approach to Rank Aggregation,” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), Workshop on Analysis of Rank Data: Confluence of Social Choice, Operations Research, and Machine Learning, Montreal, Canada, 13 Dec., 2014.
  • 2010 AVSS Best Paper Award for paper co-authored with Kai Guo and Janusz Konrad titled “Action recognition using sparse representation on covariance manifolds of optical flow” (2010 IEEE Int. Conf. Advanced Video and Signal-Based Surveillance, Aug. 2010).
  • 2010 ICPR Winner of Aerial View Activity Classification Challenge for work co-authored with Kai Guo and Janusz Konrad  titled “Action recognition in video by sparse representation on covariance manifolds of silhouette tunnels” (2010 Int. Conf. Pattern Recognition, Semantic Description of Human Activities Contest, Aug. 2010).
  • 2005 US National Science Foundation CAREER Award
  • 2007 – 2008 Dean’s Research Catalyst Award, College of Engineering, Boston University.
  • 2008 – 2009 First Prize, Entrepreneur Design Contest, College of Engineering, Boston University.
  • IEEE Senior Member (since 2007)
  • 2000–2001 Frederic T. and Edith F. Mavis Memorial Fund Scholarship Award, College of Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign.
  • Invited Member of Phi Kappa Phi (1997 – 1998)
  • 1996 J. N. Tata Endowment Scholarship, India
  • 1996 K. C. Mahindra Scholarship, India
  • 1996 Phirozeshah Godrej Award, India

Professional Service:

  • Co-chair: Inaugural Boston University Data Science (BUDS) Day, 22 January, 2016. The goal of this one-day workshop is to bring together and build a community of researchers across various schools and colleges in BU who build, analyze, or utilize statistical and computational tools to collect, curate, store, transfer, analyze, or visualize various types of data in their research. BUDS day aims to spearhead a greater understanding of data science and forge interdisciplinary connections and future research collaborations on this important topic.
  • Co-organizer and Co-chair: Second IEEE International Workshop on Change Detection, in conjunction with the International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Columbus, OH, 23-28 June, 2014. Other co-organizers and co-chairs: P-M. Jodoin (University of Sherbrooke, Canada), J. Konrad (Boston University), and F. Porikli (ANU/NICTA).
  • Organizer and Chair: Special session on Control and Signal Processing for Information Fusion, in the Forty-Seventh Annual Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, Pacific Grove, CA, 3-6 November, 2013.
  • Web Chair: IEEE International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal-Based Surveillance (AVSS), Krakow, Poland, 27-30 August, 2013.
  • Elected Member: IEEE Signal Processing Theory and Methods (SPTM) Technical Committee (2013-2015)
  • Associate Editor: IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2012-2014)
  • Co-organizer and Co-chair: Special session on Challenges in High-Dimensional Learning and Inference: Fundamental Limits and Algorithms,  in the IEEE International Statistical Signal Processing (SSP) Workshop, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 5-8 August, 2012. Other co-organizers and co-chairs: W. C. Karl and V. Saligrama (Boston University).
  • Chair of Local Arrangements: 2012 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT)
  • Co-organizer and Co-chair: First IEEE International Workshop on Change Detection, in conjunction with the International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Providence, RI, 16-21 June, 2012. Other co-organizers and co-chairs: N. Goyette and P-M. Jodoin (University of Sherbrooke, Canada), F. Porikli (MERL), and J. Konrad (Boston University).
  • Area Chair: Image and Video Mid-Level Analysis, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP)
  • Chair of Local Arrangements: 2010 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal-Based Surveillance (AVSS)
  • Special-Session Organizer and Chair: Network Computation, 2010 Information Theory and Applications (ITA) Workshop
  • Elected Member: IEEE Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IVMSP) Technical Committee (2009-2012)
  • Moderator, Panelist, and Report-author: Breakout-session on Distributed Information Sensing, Processing, and Communication, US National Science Foundation Workshop: Future Directions in Systems Research for Networked Sensing, Boston University, Boston, MA, 25-26 May, 2006
  • Chair of Exhibits and Demonstrations: 2004 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN)
  • Co-organizer and Co-chair: Berkeley-Fuse 2003 – a mini-workshop on the fundamentals of sensorwebs (environment sensing and large-scale sensor networks) aimed at bringing together researchers from the signal processing, radar, communications, control, and networking communities working on various theoretical aspects of sensing and sensor networks.
  • Invited Session-Chair:
    • Afternoon session: Thematic Program on Nexus of Information and Computation Theories, Distributed Computation and Communication Theme, Paris, France, 11 Feb., 2016.
    • Oral Session: Workshop on Recent Trends in Computer Vision, Boston, MA, 2 Mar., 2015.
    • Session on Learning, Knowledge, and Networks: 10th IEEE International Workshop on Information Theory and its Applications (ITA), San Diego, CA, 1-6 Feb., 2015.
    • Session on Classification and Pattern Recognition: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Florence, Italy, 4-9 May, 2014.
    • Session on Image and Video Biometrics: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Vancouver, Canada, 26-31 May, 2013.
    • Session on Sampling and Statistical Signal Processing: 7th IEEE International Workshop on Information Theory and its Applications (ITA), San Diego, CA, 6-10 Feb., 2012.
    • Session on Information Theory: 49th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Monticello, IL, 28–30 Sep., 2011.
    • Session on Information Theory and Cooperative Communication: 48th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Monticello, IL, 29 Sep. – 1 Oct., 2010.
    • Spotlight Poster Presentation: 7th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal-Based Surveillance (AVSS), Boston, MA, 29 Aug. – 1 Sep., 2010.
    • Session on Multi-terminal Source Coding: IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Austin, TX, 13-18 Jun., 2010.
    • Session on Network Inference and Computation: US National Science Foundation Workshop on the Frontiers in Distributed Communication, Sensing and Control, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 31 Oct. – 2 Nov., 2008.
    • Session on Source Coding: 46th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Monticello, IL, 23–26 Sep., 2008.
    • Session on Quantization: IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Toronto, Canada, 6–11 Jul., 2008.
  • Member, Technical Program Committees: IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT, 2014, 2016), IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop (SSP, 2012), IEEE-ACM International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS, 2009), IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP, 2005 – present), IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP, 2006 – present), IEEE-ACM International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2004 – 2006)
  • Reviewer: US National Science Foundation (NSF), US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, Elsevier Pattern Recognition Letters, IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), Data Compression Conference (DCC), International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).