Bir Bhanu has been made a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors for a “prolific spirit of innovation in creating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society.”

Bhanu is the Bourns presidential chair, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering, and a cooperative professor of computer science and engineering, mechanical engineering and bioengineering. He was the founding chair of electrical engineering at UCR from 1991-94 and served as the director of Center for Research in Intelligent Systems from 1998-2019. 

His current research interests are computer vision, pattern recognition and data mining, machine learning, artificial intelligence, image processing, image and video database, graphics and visualization, robotics, and human-computer interactions. His work has informed technological advances in security, defense, intelligence, biological and medical imaging, biometrics, autonomous navigation, and industrial machine vision. He holds 18 U.S. and international patents and several others are pending.

Bhanu’s inventions in the fields of computer vision and machine learning improve segmentation, tracking, and recognition of objects in images and videos, with applications in autonomous navigation, detection of stroke and traumatic brain injury, biometric recognition of people, and recognition and classification of vehicles and their make and model from video. The most recent exciting work has been for automated detection, tracking, recognition, and detailed analysis to generate tactical performance statistics of individual soccer players from videos of real-world soccer matches.

Bhanu received his bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology and a master’s of electronics engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science. He went on to obtain graduate degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and a doctoral degree in electrical engineering from USC. He also holds an MBA from UC Irvine. 

He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International Association of Pattern Recognition, the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.