INS Member to receive Emmy award

INS faculty member Al Bovik is the recipient of Television’s highest honor, an individual Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development from the Television Academy (formerly the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences). He will receive his Emmy statuette at the Engineering Emmy Awards ceremony at Loew’s Hollywood Hotel on October 28, 2015. The Academy states that ‘An Engineering Emmy Award is bestowed upon individual, company or organization for developments in engineering that are either so extensive an improvement on existing methods, or so innovative in nature, that they materially affect the transmission, recording or reception of television.’ Professor Bovik is being recognized for his work on the development of video quality prediction models which have become standard tools in broadcast and post-production houses throughout the television industry. Two of Dr. Bovik’s PhD students, Professor Zhou Wang and Dr. Hamid Shiekh  will also receive individual Emmy statuettes at the ceremony, as will their collaborator, Prof. Eero Simoncelli of NYU.

This is the first Primetime Emmy Award or national Emmy award of any type to be won by a UT-Austin faculty member. It is also the first Engineering Emmy Award to be given to academics since first instituted in 1948.