Baraniuk named National Academy of Inventors fellow

Richard Baraniuk, Rice University’s Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.  He is one of 175 academic inventors named this year, and is now among 757 fellows representing 229 research universities and governmental and nonprofit research institutes.

Jeff Fitlow

According to the organization, its fellows have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation to create or facilitate inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society. Combined, they are named inventors on more than 26,000 U.S. patents.

Baraniuk is an early contributor to the field of compressive sensing, which enables new kinds of digital cameras and medical imaging devices. Recently, he and his colleagues introduced the FlatCam, a thin, lens-less camera platform that may enable flexible, foldable, wearable and even disposable cameras. Earlier, Baraniuk was co-inventor of the single-pixel camera that, unlike cameras with millions of picture elements (pixels), used one pixel and compressive sensing to gather light into a coherent image.

He is also a pioneer in education. He founded Rice-based Connexions in 1999 to bring textbooks and other learning materials to the Internet. From that effort came OpenStax, which provides high-quality, peer-reviewed, college-level textbooks to students worldwide, either as free downloads or low-cost printed publications. More than 1.5 million college students have used OpenStax’ 25 textbooks, which will save them an estimated $70 million this academic year alone. Through OpenStax, Baraniuk is developing a software platform for textbooks that deliver personalized lessons.

This year’s fellows will be inducted next April at the academy’s annual conference in Boston.