B.S. Manjunath, a distinguished professor and chair of UC Santa Barbara’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, has been inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineers’ (AIMBE) College of Fellows, one of the highest professional honors accorded to medical and biological engineers. Manjunath, a pioneer in the field of big image data management, was elected by peers and AIMBE members "for outstanding contributions to the design, development, and deployment of a reproducible scientific-image analytics platform.”

Manjunath’s research interests include image and video analysis, multimedia databases, data mining, and signal/image processing for bio-informatics. His early work led to the development of advanced image descriptors that were eventually adopted, in 2000, by the ISO/MPEG-7 standard, and resulted in 24 U.S. and international patents, the technology for many of which was co-invented with students and researchers in his lab. MPEG-7 has since evolved to incorporate face detection and recognition methods, making its way into digital cameras and television. His expertise has also impacted multimodal big data, or data that span several forms, such as text and image, particularly in the realm of science and medicine. Physicians and scientists can now view and collaborate using a wide array of complex visual data, from 3D visualizations to brain scans and cellular imagery, as a result of an open-source image informatics platform, developed by Manjunath, called BisQue (Bio-Image Semantic Inquiry User Environment).

The director of the Center for Multimodal Big Data Science and Healthcare, and the Center for Bio-Image Informatics at UCSB, Manjunath is also a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI),

The AIMBE College of Fellows is composed of the top two percent of medical and biological engineers. Membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering and medicine research, practice, or education,” and to "the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of medical and biological engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to bioengineering education."

Manjunath and the 140 other members of the AIMBE College of Fellows Class of 2023 were inducted during a formal ceremony held in Virginia on March 27. Previous inductees include three Nobel Prize laureates, 17 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Science and/or Technology and Innovation, and more than 200 members of the National Academy of Engineering.