Biography

Professor Ioannis A. Kakadiaris, PhD is a Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor of Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA. He joined UH in August 1997 after a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned his BSc in Physics at the University of Athens in Greece, his MSc in Computer Science from Northeastern University and his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the founder and director of the Computational Biomedicine Lab. His research interests include biometrics, computer vision, and pattern recognition, biomedical image analysis and cardiovascular informatics.

Prof. Kakadiaris is the co-founder of the Pumps and Pipes initiative which examines the cross-domain innovation in the domains of medicine, oil industry and aerospace. He has more than 300 publications in international journals and conferences in biometrics, computer vision, pattern recognition, and biomedical computing. He holds twelve US patents. His articles have more than 6,000 citations according to Google Scholar and his H-number (as of June 2017) is 38. He has successfully advised and co-advised more than 50 doctoral and postdoctoral researchers and more than 50 undergraduate and graduate students.

Dr. Kakadiaris is an international expert in biometrics, data / video analytics, and biomedical computing. His team has made contributions in the areas of 3D face (and ear) recognition, 3D-aided 2D Face Recognition, 2D-2D Face Recognition, and profile-based face recognition. CBL’s 3D-3D face recognition software ranked first in the 3D-shape section of the 2007 Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) organized by NIST, while CBL’s 3D-2D method outperforms the state of the art 2D face recognition methods. Currently, CBL researchers are addressing critical challenges including low resolution data, indoor/outdoor illumination, accurate landmark and pose estimation, cross-resolution matching, and score normalization.

In addition to twice winning the UH Computer Science Research Excellence Award, Ioannis has been recognized for his work with several distinguished honors, including the NSF Early Career Development Award, the Schlumberger Technical Foundation Award, the UH Enron Teaching Excellence Award, and the James Muller Vulnerable Plaque Young Investigator Prize. His research has been featured on Discovery Channel, National Public Radio, KPRC NBC News, KTRH ABC News, and KHOU CBS News.