Prof. Al Bovik and his former student Rajiv Soundararajan have been named recipients of the IEEE Circuits and Systems for Video Technology Best Paper Award for 2016. The award recognizes their 2013 paper “Video Quality Assessment by Reduced Reference Spatio-Temporal Entropic Differencing,”  which appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology in April 2013.

Al Bovik holds the Cockrell Family Endowed Regents Chair in Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, where he is Director of the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE). He is a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Neuroscience.

Rajiv Soundararajan received the B. E degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India in 2006. He received the M. S and Ph. D degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin, USA in 2008 and 2012 respectively. He was co-supervised by Prof. Al Bovik and Prof. Sriram Vishwanath while at graduate school. Between 2012 and 2015, he was with Qualcomm Research India, Bangalore, India. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.