Leading lights from science and engineering honoured by IET
Tuesday 14 October 2008
Professor Josef Kittler of the University of Surrey has been awarded the Faraday Medal by the IET in recognition of his work on pattern recognition, image processing and computer vision.
He joins some illustrious company as on the same day Sir David Brown, former chairman of Motorola, and Ratan Tata, chairman of India’s largest conglomerate, Tata Group, have both been elected Honorary Fellows of the IET in recognition of their work in the engineering industry.
Chris Earnshaw, IET President, said: “We are delighted to honour these three outstanding members of the engineering community. All have enjoyed extensive and successful careers with a range of major companies and are inspirational to their peers and the next generation of engineers.
“Honorary Fellowship and the Faraday Medal are awarded by our Board of Trustees to individuals who are distinguished by their work in any engineering discipline or for services rendered to the IET or whose association is of benefit to the Institution.”
Professor Kittler is the Director of the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing and Professor of Machine Intelligence in the School of Electronic Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Surrey.
His career has included stints at the Universities of Cambridge, Southampton and Oxford, a period at the SERC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and a year as a Royal Society European Research Fellow at the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (ENST) in Paris.
He is a world authority in Signal Processing, extensively published with numerous awards and honours. He has served on the governing boards of major engineering associations, on the editorial boards of several scientific journals and has consulted for numerous multi-national corporations and the EU Commission.
He co-wrote a book on Pattern Recognition: A Statistical Approach and has published more than 500 papers. He was the President of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) during 1994-96.
All three will formally receive their honours at the IET awards ceremony on 3 November in London.
Editors' Notes
1. The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) is a world leading professional organisation, sharing and advancing knowledge to promote science, engineering and technology across the world. For more information, visit www.theiet.org
2. The IET dates from 1871 and has 150,000 members in 127 countries with offices in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific.
3. The IET licenses EngTech, IEng and CEng; is supporting the Engineering Diploma and developing the new ICTtech and accredits more than 160 undergraduate courses in the UK
4. The IET operates IET.tv, a web TV service which covers a wide range of engineering and technology events and content. For more information, visit www.iet.tv
5. The IET celebrates 100 years at its London home, Savoy Place, in June 2009 and will be staging a programme of centenary celebrations
