Thomas S. Huang
Thomas Shi-Tao (S.) Huang was born on June 26th, 1936, in Shanghai, China, where he lived until age 13, when his family moved to Taiwan. He would go on to study electronics at the National University of Taiwan and was awarded his bachelor's degree in 1956. Soon after, he traveled to the United States to further his education at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). He worked with Peter Elias on information theory and image coding and with William F. Schreiber, his master's and doctoral thesis advisor. His master's thesis was titled, Picture statistics and linearly interpolative coding, and his doctoral thesis was Pictorial noise. (2)
After receiving his doctorate degree in 1963, Huang accepted a position in the department of electrical engineering at MIT, where he became a tenured professor and would teach until 1973. Then, in 1973, he accepted a position as a professor of electrical engineering director of the Information and Signal Processing Laboratory at Purdue University. He would stay at Purdue until 1980 when he accepted a chaired position in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 1996, he became the first William L. Everitt Distinguished Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering. Huang worked with the Coordinated Science Laboratory throughout his career at the University of Illinois. In addition, he served as head of the Image Formation and Processing Group at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and as co-chair of its research department on Human-Computer Intelligent Interaction. In 2012, two years before his retirement from teaching, he was named a Swanlund chair, the highest endowed title at the university. (2-4)
Professionally Huang would also be founding editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing and Springer Series in Information Sciences. He also helped establish the first Picture Coding Symposium in 1969, International Workshop on Very Low Bitrate Video Coding in 1993, and International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition in 1995. Like many of the scientific scholars to emerge from UIUC, Huang contributed greatly to his field of study. As of 2010, Huang had published over twenty books and had published over 600 papers and for which he received a number of accolades such as the Azriel Rosenfeld Award, HP Innovation Research Award, IEEE Jack Kilby Signal Processing Medal, and the King-Sun Fu Prize. (2-4)
Thomas Shi-Tao (S.) Huang would, unfortunately, pass away on April 25th, 2020, at the age of 83, just three months after his wife Margaret. They were married for 61 years and left behind four children. Before his death, he established the Thomas and Margaret Huang Endowed Professorship in Signal Processing and Data Science. (1-2)