Curriculum vitae (pdf)
Wikipedia page
Google Scholar profile (publications)
NAE profile
American Academy profile
Awards and honors
TED talk
Recent press
Rice DSP Group
Richard G. Baraniuk is the C. Sidney Burrus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University, a member of the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) research group, and Founder/Director of OpenStax. He is also a joint faculty member in the Rice departments of Computer Science and Statistics.
Dr. Baraniuk is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and IEEE. He has received the DOD Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow Award (National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship), the IEEE Signal Processing Society Norbert Wiener Society Award and Claude Shannon-Harry Nyquist Technical Achievement Award, the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education, and the IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal, among others.
Dr. Baraniuk holds 45 granted US and 8 foreign patents, 6 of which have been licensed to Siemens to radically accelerate magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and several others that have been licensed to a major consumer electronics company. Notable inventions/co-inventions include: the single-pixel camera, FlatCam, FlatScope, compressive radar imaging, distributed compressive sensing, several ultrawideband analog-to-information converters, and the SPARFA learning and content analytics framework.
Dr. Baraniuk's PhD and Postdoc alums have gone on to faculty positions at top research universities worldwide, including Columbia, CMU, Cornell, Georgia Tech (5), NYU, U. Michigan, U. Maryland (2), U. Wisconsin, U. Minnesota, U Mass Amherst, Arizona State University, Colorado School of Mines, North Carolina State University (2), Baylor College of Medicine, McGill, ENS-Lyon, KU-Leuven, EPFL, ETH-Zurich, as well as a range of startups and industrial research labs. They have won many research awards, including the IEEE Kilby Medal, Packard Fellow, PECASE (2), and IEEE Fellow (3). Baraniuk's Academic Family Tree.
Dr. Baraniuk grew up in Winnipeg, Canada, the coldest city in the world with a population over 600,000 (more) and home of K-tel, The Guess Who, Neil Young, Beck's grandfather, and Douglas Rain, the voice of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, among others. He received the B.Sc. degree in 1987 from the University of Manitoba, the M.Sc. degree in 1988 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Ph.D. degree in 1992 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, all in Electrical Engineering. In 1986, he was a research engineer with Omron Tateisi Electronics in Kyoto, Japan. While at the University of Illinois, he held a joint appointment with the CERL Sound Group of the Computer-based Education Research Lab (CERL, developer of the PLATO system) and the Coordinated Science Laboratory. After spending 1992-1993 at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, he joined the faculty of Rice University in Houston, Texas. He spent a sabbatical at Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Télécommunications in Paris in 2001 and Ecole Fédérale Polytechnique de Lausanne in Switzerland in 2002.
Signal Processing and Machine Learning
Dr. Baraniuk's research interests in signal processing and machine learning lie primarily in new theory and algorithms involving low-dimensional models. His research on theory of deep learning, compressive sensing, multiscale natural image modeling using wavelet-domain hidden Markov models, and time-frequency analysis has been funded by NSF, DARPA, ONR, AFOSR, AFRL, ARO, IARPA, DOE, NGA, EPA, NATO, the Texas Instruments Leadership University Program, and several companies. In particular, he has served as Project Director for the ARO MURI on "Opportunistic Sensing" from 2013-2018, the ONR MURI on "Foundations of Deep Learning" from 2020-2025, the DARPA/DOE "INCITE" project, and several DARPA projects, including "Analog to Information," "Analog to Information Receiver," and "Network Modeling and Simulation." He was a member of the DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study Group from 2008-2011. More information on his signal processing and machine learning research.
Open Education, Connexions, and OpenStax
Dr. Baraniuk is one of the founders of the Open Education movement that promotes the use of free and open-source-licensed Open Educational Resources (OER). He is the Founder and Director of OpenStax (formerly Connexions), a non-profit educational and scholarly publishing project he founded in 1999 to bring textbooks and learning materials into the Internet Age. During the 2021-22 school year, OpenStax's free and open-source texts are in use by 6.5 million students and 16,000 faculty at 64% of all US colleges and universities. Since 2012, 25 million students have saved $1.7B. This work has been supported by a number of generous venture philanthropists, foundations, Rice University, and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Baraniuk opened for Peter Gabriel at TED 2006; his talk has been viewed over 1 million times to date.
Baraniuk's current education research focuses on new machine learning systems for personalized learning, question synthesis and answering, and knowledge representation.
Awards and Honors
- 2022
- Member of the National Academy of Engineering
IEEE Signal Processing Society Norbert Wiener Society Award
Winner of the Automated Scoring Challenge for The Nation's Report Card, Institute of Education Sciences, Department of Education (Team leader: Andrew Lan)
- 2021
- Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education
IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award - 2020
- SPARC Innovator Award for OpenStax
- 2019
- Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters) Highly Cited Researcher
- 2018
- Faculty Award for Excellence in Research, Teaching, and Scholarship (Rice)
Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters) Highly Cited Researcher
- 2017
- Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow (National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow)
Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Best Paper Honorable Mention, International Conference on Computational Photography (ICCP)
Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters) Highly Cited Researcher
Hershel M. Rich Invention Award (Rice)
- 2016
- Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors
Thomson Reuters' Highly Cited Researcher
Person of Impact, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Hershel M. Rich Invention Award (Rice)
- 2015
- IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal
IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award
Thomson Reuters' Highly Cited Researcher
(T+R)² Award for Excellence in Teaching and Research Award (Rice) - 2014
- IEEE Signal Processing Society Claude Shannon-Harry Nyquist Technical Achievement Award
Thomson Reuters’ Highly Cited Researcher
Presidential Mentoring Award (Rice) - 2012
- SPIE Compressive Sampling Pioneer Award
- 2011
- WISE Education Award for Connexions (Qatar Foundation)
Padovani Lecture, IEEE Information Theory Society - 2010
- IEEE Signal Processing Society Education Award
- 2009
- Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
IEEE Signal Processing Society Magazine Column Award
World Technology Award for Education
- 2008
- Internet Pioneer Award, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard U.
SPIE Wavelet Pioneer Award
- 2007
- Edutopia Magazine’s “Daring Dozen” Education Innovators
MIT Technology Review TR10 Top 10 Emerging Technology for Single-Pixel Camera
Hershel M. Rich Invention Award (Rice)
- 2006
- Tech Museum of Innovation Laureate for Connexions
George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching (Rice)
- 2003
- Co-Author on Passive and Active Measurement Workshop Student Paper Award (with V. Ribeiro, R. Riedi, J. Navratil, and L. Cottrell)
George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching (Rice) - 2002
- Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE)
- 2001
- Co-Author on IEEE Signal Processing Society Junior Paper Award
(with winners M. Crouse and R. Nowak)
IEEE NORSIG Best Paper Award (with E. Monsen, J. Odegard, H. Choi, J. Romberg)
George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching (Rice)
- 2000
- University of Illinois ECE Young Alumni Achievement Award
Charles Duncan Junior Faculty Achievement Award (Rice)
- 1999
- C. Holmes MacDonald National Outstanding Teaching Award (IEEE, Eta Kappa Nu)
- 1998
- Rosenbaum Fellowship, Isaac Newton Institute (Cambridge University)
- 1995
- ONR Young Investigator Award
- 1994
- NSF National Young Investigator Award
- 1992
- National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada NATO Postdoctoral
Fellowship
- 1987
- Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Fellowship Bacon Scholarship
Eta Kappa Nu Award for Second-Ranked Graduating Electrical Engineer
(U. Manitoba)
IEEE Award for Best Undergraduate Thesis Defense (U. Manitoba)
- 1986
- E. P. Fetherstonhaugh Scholarship (U. Manitoba)
- 1977
- Top Project at the University of Winnipeg Science Symposium
(Provincial Science Fair)