The UC Santa Barbara Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) recently honored Distinguished Professor B.S. Manjunath, known for his transformative research on computer vision and neural networks, by naming him the first Frank Koenig Distinguished Chair in Signals and Systems. Established through a generous gift from Frank Koenig (MS ‘85) a prominent electrical engineer and the named inventor on seven patents, the chair supports excellence in computer and electrical engineering at the university that provided the foundation for Koenig’s own career in electrical engineering.

“I am very grateful for the recognition, and I also view this chair as a sign of confidence in the ECE department and what it is doing in terms of long-term work and sustaining curiosity, which is, of course, what all research is about,” Manjunath said.
Vision and machine learning, Manjunath noted, have been unusually powerful forces in his career because of the challenges and potential rewards the field offers. “If we can’t represent, search, compare, and reason over visual data at scale, then a lot of scientific information remains effectively inaccessible,” he said. “Vision is a hard problem, because visual data is noisy, and context-dependent, while also being incredibly rich. And because visual data shows up everywhere, advances in visual  representation and analysis tend to have outsized impact.”

In Manjunath’s work, that impact spans fields. From helping clinicians interpret brain imaging for disorders such as normal pressure hydrocephalus, to enabling the Smithsonian to analyze vast digital collections, to supporting materials scientists in understanding microstructures in next-generation materials, the common thread is turning visual data into usable knowledge.

With this endowment, Koenig said, he hopes to support the education of the coming generation of engineers and scientists, believing that contributions “at this scale likely generate a disproportionately high payback. The choice to endow this specific chair comes from [my desire to] honor what I'm familiar with and grateful to,” said Koenig, who, during his career, specialized in signal processing, analog-circuit design, and system integration. “I’m beyond happy with where I see this going.”

At a ceremony to commemorate the new endowed chair, held last month, Manjunath spoke about his research on scalable visual intelligence, pursued in collaboration with researchers and students in his department and across the university. The ceremony included remarks from Koenig, Umesh Mishra, dean of The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering, and ECE chair, Luke Theogarajan.

“Professor Manjunath is an international leader in image analysis. And not only does he do exemplary research, he also bridges the gap between that research and commercial products,” Mishra said. “What’s really impressive is that, alongside this work, he has mentored fifty-three PhD students and more than one hundred fifty undergraduates, sharing his knowledge and insights with future engineers across disciplines at our campus.”

At the Vision Research Lab, Manjunath and his colleagues develop algorithms and systems in computer vision, machine learning, and image processing. Their work spans applications from digital libraries and remote sensing to materials science and the life sciences, and has made foundational contributions to image retrieval, feature extraction, segmentation, and scalable image informatics. Manjunath is the creator of BisQue, a reproducible, web-based scientific image analytics platform that has transformed how researchers visualize, analyze, and collaborate on complex multimodal imaging data. He is also a co-founder of Mayachitra, a company established to translate research advances into real-world systems, where his team develops advanced technologies for multimodal data analysis and cybersecurity. 

Manjunath is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Association for Computing Machinery, the National Academy of Inventors, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineers. In 2020, he received the prestigious Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Computer Society for his work in image search retrieval, and bio-image informatics. He is the author of more than 350 peer-reviewed publications and holds 29 U.S. patents. In 2025, he received the Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award from the UCSB Academic Senate. 

At the ceremony, Theogarajan noted that the Frank Koenig Distinguished Chair in Signals and Systems is one of four endowed chairs in the ECE Department. Mark Rodwell holds the Doluca Professor of Electrical and Computer chair; Mishra holds the Donald W. Whittier Chair in Electrical Engineering; and distinguished professor emeritus John Bowers held the Fred Kavli Chair in Nanotechnology. These chairs are considered one of the highest honors given to university faculty, and the financial gift associated with each chair provides an investment in a faculty member’s research, enhances his or her ability to mentor students, and provides other opportunities.

“These endowed chairs strengthen our reputation,” Theogarajan said, “which makes them extremely important.”