Professor Klaus Mueller, from the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University, was recently recognized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Board of Directors as a 2024 IEEE Fellow for contributions in image reconstruction and visualization. IEEE is a professional organization dedicated to the advancement of technology for the benefit of humanity. This is a tremendous honor as less than 0.1% of the voting members are selected for this elevation.
Currently a senior member of IEEE, there is no doubt Mueller qualifies for this recognition. He has been active on IEEE initiatives since 2001 and has served in several capacities and committees throughout the years. After serving as Chair of the IEEE CS Technical Committee on Visualization and Computer Graphics (VGTC) from 2012 to 2015, he was awarded with the IEEE Computer Science Golden Core Award and the IEEE Computer Society Meritorious Service Certification in 2016.
Mueller’s interests lie in medical imaging, visualization, visual analytics. explainable AI, and high performance computing. He received his PhD in computer science from The Ohio State University in 1998 and served as the founding chair of SUNY Korea’s Department of Computer Science as well as VP for Academic Affairs and Finance at SUNY Korea. Currently, Mueller is the Interim Department Chair for the Department of Technology & Society at Stony Brook University and a Senior Scientist (Guest Appointment) at Brookhaven National Lab.
As a leader in the IEEE community, Mueller has made multiple contributions. One of these is his 2002 paper on image colorization which has been cited 1,200+ times and which is known as the earliest paper on the topic. In this paper, Dr. Mueller was the first to develop a pioneering machine learning method that colorized a gray-level pixel based on the gray-level statistics of its neighborhood.
Noteworthy in this context is also his pioneering effort in the use of high performance commodity graphics hardware, back then used mainly to accelerate computer games, also for compute-intensive scientific applications, such as computed tomography reconstruction in medical and industrial CT. Mueller wrote a series of groundbreaking papers to advance this idea to their now mainstream use.
As a frequent speaker at international conferences, Mueller has participated in over 18 tutorials on various topics and has written over 300 peer-review journal articles totalling 13,000+ citations. These papers include publications in Nature Machine Intelligence, IEEE Medical Imaging, Medical Physics, Physics in Medicine and Biology, IEEE Computational Imaging, IEEE Nuclear Imaging, ACM CHI, CSCW, and SIGGRAPH, and 38 papers in the flagship journal of visualization, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
When hearing the news, Mueller said, “I am thankful for all of the support I have received from the chairs of the computer science department. When I joined IEEE, I never dreamed I would reach this kind of level.”
With such outstanding experiences and contributions towards science, it does not come as a surprise that Klaus Mueller was named an IEEE Fellow. Congratulations to Prof. Mueller on this career milestone!
-Kimberly Xiao