Tanveer Fathima Syeda-Mahmood is an Indian-American computer scientist whose research topics include

image retrieval An image retrieval system is a computer system used for browsing, searching and retrieving images from a large database of digital images. Most traditional and common methods of image retrieval utilize some method of adding metadata such as captio ...

multimedia database A Multimedia database (MMDB) is a collection of related for multimedia data. The multimedia data include one or more primary media data types such as text, images, graphic objects (including drawings, sketches and illustrations) animation sequence ...

s, and

medical image analysis Medical image computing (MIC) is an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of computer science, information engineering, electrical engineering, physics, mathematics and medicine. This field develops computational and mathematical methods fo ...

. She is a chief scientist for the

IBM Research IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American Multinational corporation, multinational information technology company. IBM Research is headquartered at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York ...

Almaden Laboratory in

San Jose, California San Jose, officially the City of San José ( ; ), is a cultural, commercial, and political center within Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. With a city population of 997,368 and a metropolitan area population of 1.95 million, it is ...

, where she has led groups developing cognitive assistants for

radiologists Radiology ( ) is the medical specialty that uses medical imaging to diagnose diseases and guide treatment within the bodies of humans and other animals. It began with radiography (which is why its name has a root referring to radiation), but tod ...

and

cardiologist Cardiology () is the study of the heart. Cardiology is a branch of medicine that deals with disorders of the heart and the cardiovascular system. The field includes medical diagnosis and treatment of congenital heart defects, coronary artery di ...

assistive technology Assistive technology (AT) is a term for assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative devices for Disability, people with disabilities and the elderly. Disabled people often have difficulty performing activities of daily living (ADLs) independently, ...

for people with

memory impairment Amnesia is a deficit in memory caused by brain damage or brain diseases,Gazzaniga, M., Ivry, R., & Mangun, G. (2009) Cognitive Neuroscience: The biology of the mind. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. but it can also be temporarily caused by t ...

s, and biologically inspired storage media.

Education and career

Syeda-Mahmood was home-schooled, and then skipped two grades after entering primary school in India. She earned a bachelor's degree in electronics and communication from

Osmania University Osmania University is a collegiate university, collegiate Public university, public State university (India), state university located in Hyderabad, Telangana, India. Mir Osman Ali Khan, the 7th Nizam of Hyderabad, issued a ''firman'' calling f ...

, and a master's degree in computer science from

IIT Madras The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras or IIT-M) is a public technical university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. It is one of the eight public Institutes of Eminence of India. As an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), ...

. She went to the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

for doctoral study, funded by an IBM graduate fellowship; her early projects there included a 1988 prototype

robotic vacuum cleaner A robotic vacuum cleaner, sometimes called a robovac or a roomba as a generic trademark, is an autonomous vacuum cleaner which has a limited vacuum floor cleaning system combined with sensors and robotic drives with programmable controllers an ...

. After completing her Ph.D. at MIT in 1993, under the supervision of

Eric Grimson William Eric Leifur Grimson (born 1953) is a Canadian-born computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he served as Chancellor from 2011 to 2014. An expert in computer vision, he headed MIT's Department of ...

, she worked for

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (, ) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox was the pioneer of the photocopier market, beginning with the introduc ...

at their Webster Research Center, on

content-based image retrieval Content-based image retrieval, also known as query by image content ( QBIC) and content-based visual information retrieval (CBVIR), is the application of computer vision techniques to the image retrieval problem, that is, the problem of searching ...

, before moving to IBM in 1998.

Recognition

Syeda-Mahmood was named as an

IEEE Fellow , the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and ot ...

, in the 2011 class of fellows, "for contributions to content-based image and video indexing and retrieval". She is an

IBM Fellow An IBM Fellow is a position at IBM appointed by the CEO. Typically only four to nine (eleven in 2014) IBM Fellows are appointed each year, in May or June. Fellow is the highest honor a scientist, engineer, or programmer at IBM can achieve. Over ...

, elected in 2016, and a member of the IBM Academy of Technology. In 2020 she was inducted into the

American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) is a non-profit organization founded in 1991, and headquartered in Washington, D.C. It represents 50,000 medical and Biomedical engineering, biomedical engineers, and academic i ...

College of Fellows, "for outstanding technical achievement and leadership in multimodal imaging decision support with lasting impact to academia/industry in healthcare AI".

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Syeda-Mahmood, Tanveer Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Osmania University alumni IIT Madras alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni IBM Research computer scientists IBM Fellows Fellows of the IEEE Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering