Thomas S. Huang
About Optica
In Memoriam: Thomas S. Huang, 1937-2020
25 April 2020
Thomas S. Huang, OSA Fellow and former Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, passed away on 25 April 2020 at the age of 83. Huang was known for his research in signal processing, pattern recognition and computer vision. One of his most significant contributions related to understanding the relationship between 2D and 3D imaging. Huang’s early work was instrumental in developing compression standards for images. He was committed to interdisciplinary research and held the Maybelle Leland Swanlund Endowed Chair Emeritus in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois.
Huang was born on 26 June 1936 in Shanghai, China. His family moved to Taiwan in 1949, and he studied electronics at the National Taiwan University and completed his undergraduate degree in 1956. Huang received a Doctor of Science degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963 and was on faculty at MIT until 1973. He moved onto Purdue University where he taught for seven years, before accepting a position at the University of Illinois (UI) in 1980. Huang stayed at UI until his retirement in 2014. While at UI, Huang completed pioneering research in the field of image compression and mentored more than 100 students. He published extensively, having contributed to 21 books and more than 600 journal and conference papers. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, Chinese Academy of Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Academia Sinica. Huang was made an OSA Fellow in 1986.
After his retirement, Huang remained active within the scientific community, conducting research in the area of deep learning or the ability of computers to attribute layers to images. His family has established the Thomas and Margaret Huang Endowed Professorship in Signal Processing and Data Science in the department of electrical and computer engineering at UI in his honor.
Thomas Huang was a talented educator and scientist who will be missed by his many students, collaborators, and friends. OSA and the scientific community mourn the loss of Thomas Huang.
