Professor
Alfred M. Bruckstein : Doctor Honoris Causa of Agora University
A brief CV
Alfred
M. Bruckstein, born in Sighetu Marmatiei – Maramures, Transylvania, Romania, in
1954, received his BSc and MSc degrees
at the Technion, Haifa, in 1976 and 1980, respectively and then earned a Ph.D.
degree in Electrical Engineering in Stanford University, California in 1984,
his advisor being Professor Thomas Kailath.
From
October 1984 he has been with the Technion, where he now holds of the Ollendorff
Chair in Science, in the Computer Science Department. His research interests are in Ants and Swarm
Robotics, Signal and Image Processing, Image Analysis and Synthesis, Pattern Recognition,
and various aspects of Applied Geometry. Professor Bruckstein authored and
co-authored over one hundred and fifty journal papers in the fields of interest
mentioned.
Professor
Bruckstein held visiting positions at MIT, Groningen University in Holland,
Stanford University, and TsingHua University in Beijing, China, Evry University and at CEREMADE, Dauphine University
in Paris, France, and was a
visiting Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill, from
1987 to 2000, working with Dr. Arun Netravali and several colleagues there on
Image Processing and Computer Vision topics. Since 2009 he is also a Visiting
Professor at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, at the School
of Mathematical and Physical Sciences.
From
2002 till 2005 he served as the Dean of Technion’s Graduate School, and from
2006-2011 as the Head of Technion’s Excellence Program for Undergraduate
Studies.
Professor Bruckstein
is a member of the AMS, and MAA, and is a SIAM Fellow for contributions to
Signal Processing, Image Analysis, and Ant Robotics, and received SIAM’s 2014 SIAG-Imaging
Science Prize (with David Donoho and Michael Elad, for the paper “From Sparse
Solutions of Systems of Equations to Sparse Modeling of Signals and Images”).
Professor Bruckstein is happily married to
Rita and they have one son, Ariel, with whom they wrote and illustrated a
bestiary of imaginary animals of Ariel’s invention called “The Knocktopus and
His Friends”, published by Panopticum Press in 2013. He also illustrated several books, most of
them published by his late father Ludovic Bruckstein, in Romanian, Hebrew and
French, and a collection of humorous verse
in Hebrew, by Professor Irad Yavne, entitled ”Comical Relief”,
describing Academic Life in general, and at the Technion, in particular.
In 1993, Professor Bruckstein published a paper titled “Why the Ant Trails
Look So Straight and Nice” in “The Mathematical Intelligencer” Journal (Vol
15/2, pp.59-62), introducing a chain-pursuit model for the process of ant-trail
optimization based on a
simple rule of local interactions between consecutive agents in the chain. The
paper was reviewed in Science (USA), The New Scientist (England), Resonance
(India), and many other popular scientific publications world-wide and was
selected as a Top Story in Mathematics, in a Special Issue “The Year 1993 in
Science” of the Journal Discover (USA). This paper subsequently led to a series of
research theses and papers examining various examples of local interactions
betweens simple agents leading to emergent global behaviours in swarms. Professor
Bruckstein’s work in this field, which by now has resulted in five PhD Dissertations
and seven MSc Theses at the Technion by a distinguished group of students under
his guidance, made a notable impact in the field of Ant-Robotics and
Multi-Agent Systems.
Professor Bruckstein’s work in other areas of research include contributions to Modeling of
Neural Coding using Stochastic Point Processes, to Estimation and Scattering
Theory in Signal Processing, to Sparse and Holographic Signal Representations, to Variational Models in Image Processing and
Low-Level Machine Vision, to Pattern Recognition and Fiducial Design
Methodologies, to Shape Analysis and Probing in Computer Vision and Robotics, and
to Digital, Discretized and Applied Geometry Topics. His research in these areas, carried out over
the past thirty years jointly with an outstanding group of students doing PhD
and MSc Theses under his academic supervision, and with several Post-Docs, Visitors
and Collaborators from several Universities and from Bell Laboratories, led
over the years to significant and seminal research papers published in leading
venues world-wide, and a total of thirteen PhD Theses and about fifty MSc
Theses so far.
Among Professor Bruckstein’s students, visitors and post-Docs over the
years, one finds world-famous, and top-class
researchers like Professor Michael Lindenbaum (Technion,Israel),
Professor Nahum Kiryati (TelAvivU, Israel), Professor Ron Kimmel (Technion,
Israel), Professor Guillermo Sapiro (DukeU, USA), Professor Polina Golland
(MIT, USA), Professor Guy Lebanon (Georgia Tech/Netflix, USA), Professor Ilan
Shimshoni (Haifa U, Israel), Professor Miki Elad (Technion, Israel), Dr. Doron
Shaked (HP Research, GE Research, Israel), Dr Amir Arnon (IBMResearch, USA) Dr.
Israel Wagner (IBM Research, Israel), Dr. Yaniv Altshuler(ENDOR/MIT, USA), Dr. Noam
Gordon (CamTek, Israel), Dr Ychin Pnueli (Google,Israel) , Dr Yotam Elor
(Final, Israel), Dr. Eli Osherovich (Amazon Research, Israel), Dr Vladimir
Yanovski (UToronto, Canada), Dr Tal Nir (HiTech, Israel), Dr Ruth Onn (HiTech,
Israel), Dr. Rotem Manor (HiTech, Israel), Dr Wang Yu (HiTech, Singapore), Dr
Daniel Vainshencher (PrincetonU, USA) and many further outstanding Scientists
and Engineers, making significant contributions to HiTech, in Israel and
world-wide.
Professor Alfred M. Bruckstein have over 21,000 citations in Google Scholar.
Professor A.M. Bruckstein is a member in Editorial Board of
International Journal of Computers Communications & Control
edited by Agora University (IF=1.374).
Also he is a keynote speaker at IEEE-ICCCC2018.
On May 9, 2018, Prof. Alfred Bruckstein will be awarded, in an
official ceremony, with the best honorary title of Agora University:
Doctor Honoris Causa.
ANALYSIS COMMISSION
FOR LAUDATIO*
on the occasion of
awarding the title
Doctor Honoris Causa
to Professor Alfred M. Bruckstein
President:
Acad. Florin Gheorghe Filip, Romanian Academy, Romania.
Members:
1. Prof. Misu-Jan Manolescu, Agora University of Oradea,
Romania.
2. Prof. Razvan Andonie, Central Washington University,
USA.
3. Prof. Felisa Cordova, University Finis
Terra, Chile.
4. Prof. Barnabas Bede, DigiPen Institute of Technology, USA.
5. Prof. Yezid Donoso, University
de los Andes, Colombia.
*Note. The Commission has been
nominated by Rector Decision No. 420/12.01.2018 based on approval of Agora
University Senate.
