Rice engineer Richard Baraniuk elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

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Rice University professor and engineer Richard Baraniuk has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is one of 228 new members announced April 12 by the academy, which honors some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists and civic, business and philanthropic leaders.
Richard Baraniuk
Baraniuk is the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice. Others in the academy’s Class of 2017 include philanthropist and singer-songwriter John Legend, actress Carol Burnett, chairman of the board of Xerox Corp. Ursula Burns, mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, immunologist James P. Allison, writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Pulitzer Prize winners, MacArthur Fellows and winners of the Academy, Grammy, Emmy and Tony awards.
“In a tradition reaching back to the earliest days of our nation, the honor of election to the American Academy is also a call to service,” said Academy President Jonathan F. Fanton. “Through our projects, publications and events, the academy provides members with opportunities to make common cause and produce the useful knowledge for which the academy’s 1780 charter calls.”
Baraniuk is one of the world’s leading experts on machine learning and compressive sensing, a branch of signal processing that enables engineers to deduce useful information from far fewer data samples than would ordinarily be required. He is a co-inventor of the single-pixel camera and of the FlatCam, a lens-less camera that is thinner than a dime and can be fabricated like a microchip.
A pioneer in education, Baraniuk founded Rice-based Connexions in 1999 to bring textbooks and other learning materials to the internet. Next came OpenStax, which provides high-quality, peer-reviewed, college-level textbooks to students worldwide as free downloads or low-cost printed publications. More than 1.8 million college students have used one of the 27 textbooks published by OpenStax. These textbooks are estimated to have saved students more than $100 million during the 2016-17 academic year. Baraniuk ...

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