| Rui J. P. de Figueiredo | |
|---|---|
| Born | Panjim, Goa, India |
| Residence | United States |
| Fields | Electrical Engineering Applied Mathematics |
| Institutions | University of California at Irvine |
| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Harvard University |
| Doctoral advisor | Philippe Le Corbeiller |
| Notable awards | IEEE CAS Society Technical Achievement Award (1994) IEEE CAS Society Mac Van Valkenburg Award (2002) Kapitsa Medal (2009) |
Rui Jose Pacheco de Figueiredo is an electrical engineer, mathematician, computer scientist, and a professor of electrical engineering, computer engineering, and applied mathematics at the University of California, Irvine.
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De Figueiredo was born in Panjim, Goa, India where he grew up. After graduating from high school, he left India to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a BS degree in 1950, and an MS degree in 1952. He subsequently received a PhD from Harvard University in 1959.
De Figueiredo worked as a consultant for the Portuguese Atomic Energy Commission while finishing his PhD, and upon graduation, became the head of the Applied Math and Physics Division of the Nuclear Research Center, in Sacavem, Portugal. In 1962, he returned to the United States to take a tenured position as an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering at Purdue University. In 1965, he became a Full Professor jointly appointed in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Applied Mathematics at Rice University. In 1990, de Figueiredo moved to Irvine, California, where he is a Professor in both the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and Mathematics Department at the University of California at Irvine. He also was founder and Director of the Laboratory for Intelligent Signal Processing and Communications at UCI.
De Figueiredo is married to Isabel Colaco de Figueiredo and has five children, Alcina Dalton, Paulo (Paul) de Figueiredo, Joao (John) de Figueiredo, Rui de Figueiredo, Jr., and Miguel (Michael) de Figueiredo. Rui, Jr., is a professor at Haas School of Business.[1]
De Figueiredo is best known for his work developing novel mathematical foundations for the solution of fundamentally nonlinear problems, with applications in pattern recognition, signal processing, image processing, and neural networks. In the early 1970s, de Figueiredo introduced approaches for generalized splines for optimal signal based recovery to the field of signal processing. One of his most well-known contributions was the invention and study of the Generalized Fock space F, a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space of input-output maps of generic nonlinear dynamical systems, and used a “linear” orthogonal projection in F for optimal recovery of such “nonlinear” maps from the input-output data. This approach extended to nonlinear systems the powerful orthogonal projection method, previously used exclusively for linear systems. The analytics behind this approach are represented as neural networks, which ultimately led to the development of de Figueiredo’s Optimal Interpolation neural network and CDL neural network. Related to his work in neural networks, de Figueiredo is also known for his contributions to the understanding of nonlinear filters. In this area, de Figueiredo developed filters for adaptive image restoration, for image contrast sharpening tuned to human visual perception based on Munsell’s scale, and for non-Gaussian noise suppression.