Professor Al Hero appointed the R. Jamison and Betty Williams Professor of Engineering

Prof. Al Hero has been appointed the R. Jamison and Betty Williams Professor of Engineering. This professorship is given in recognition of Prof. Hero’s sustained excellence in research, teaching, and service within the College of Engineering.

Prof. Hero’s research interests include: inference in sensor networks, adaptive sensing, bioinformatics, inverse problems, and statistical signal and image processing. He holds appointments in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Statistics, and during the summer holds an appointment as Digiteo Chaire d’Excellence at the Digiteo Research Park in Information Science and Technology, Paris, France.

His extensive service to the professional community reveals his deep ties to many different areas of information theory and signal processing. To mention just a few: he served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, the IEEE Trans. on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and the IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing. He was General Chairman of the 1995 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, and co-chair of the 1999 IEEE Information Theory Workshop on Detection, Estimation, Classification and Filtering, and the 2002 Workshop on Genomic Signal Processing and Statistics. He was also Chair of Commission C (Signals and Systems) of the US National Commission of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI) (1999-2002).

While President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2006-07), Prof. Hero “spearheaded the recent Connexions/Signal Processing Society electronic open access initiative. This initiative is one of the first open access projects undertaken by the IEEE and is an ambitious effort to launch a new vehicle for delivering certified quality educational content to the educational, scientific, and engineering communities.” [See IEEE Nominations for Division IX]

He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and has received an IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award, an IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award, and the IEEE Third Millenium Medal.

Prof. Hero has published more than 350 journal and conference papers, and graduated approx. 30 PhD students. He is the author of the book, Foundations and Application of Sensor Management. His friends and fellow musicians also know him as an accomplished vocalist and musician.