Venu Govindaraju, PhD is VP for Research & Economic Development, SUNY Distinguished Professor and pioneer of impactful artificial intelligence technologies with global reach.
He has spent his entire career at the University at Buffalo. After graduating with a Ph.D from the University at Buffalo, he worked from 1992 to 2003 as a research scientist at the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR), at the University at Buffalo founded and managed by Sargur Srihari. He became Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo in 2000, a full Professor in 2002, and a SUNY Distinguished Professor, the highest faculty rank in the State University of New York system, in 2010. Govindaraju was the founding director of the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors and has remained its director since its inception in 2003.
At a time when the idea of practical artificial intelligence systems seemed more like science fiction than reality, Dr. Venu Govindaraju led a team of graduate students and research scientists who pioneered the world’s first autonomous system capable of deciphering handwritten addresses. Operating at a remarkable speed of 13 postal mail pieces per second, the software system interpreted natural handwriting without the need for rigid guidelines, structured forms, or meticulously printed text. Initially funded by the U.S. Postal Service, it was subsequently adopted by the Australia Post and the UK Royal Mail. It was a transformative development that ultimately impacted the entire field of DAR. Today, the automated software system proficiently reads addresses on nearly all handwritten mail in the United States in real-time, resulting in billions of dollars in savings for the postal service and is widely regarded as one of the first success stories in artificial intelligence.
