Shih-Fu Chang

Shih-Fu Chang is Richard Dicker Chair Professor, Director of the Digital Video and Multimedia Lab, and Senior Vice Dean of Engineering School at Columbia University. He is an active researcher leading development of theories, algorithms, and systems for multimedia analysis and retrieval. In the last two decades, he and his students developed some of the earliest image/video search engines, such as VisualSEEk, VideoQ, and WebSEEk, contributing to the foundation of the vibrant field of content-based visual search and commercial systems for Web image search today. Recognized by best paper awards and citation impacts, his scholarly work set trends in several important areas, such as compressed-domain video manipulation, video structure parsing, image authentication, large-scale machine learning, and semantic video analysis. His group demonstrated the best performance in the international video retrieval evaluation forum TRECVID (2008 and 2010).

The video concept classifier library, ontology, and annotated video corpora released by his group have been used by more than 100 groups. He co-led the ADVENT university-industry research consortium with the participation of more than 25 industry sponsors. He has received the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award, ACM SIG Multimedia Technical Achievement Award, the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu award, IBM Faculty award, and Service Recognition Awards from IEEE and ACM. He served as the general co-chair of ACM Multimedia conference in 2000 and 2010, Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2006-8), Chairman of Columbia Electrical Engineering Department (2007-2010), Senior Vice Dean of Columbia Engineering School (2012-date), and advisor for several companies and research institutes. His research has been broadly supported by government agencies (NSF, DARPA, IARPA, NGA, ONR, NY State) as well as many industry sponsors. He is a Fellow of IEEE and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.