Arie Kaufman, PhD

Arie Kaufman is the CEWIT Chief Scientist, the Director of the Center of Visual Computing (CVC), and a Distinguished Professor of Radiology at Stony Brook University. He joined the faculty at Stony Brook in 1985 and was appointed Chair of  the Department of Computer Science, from 1999 to 2018. He also held posts at the Hebrew University, Tel-Aviv University, Florida International University, Ben-Gurion University, and Columbia University.

Kaufman was internationally recognized for his contributions to information technology, specifically to visualization and graphics. He was elected to the highest level of a Fellow of IEEE "for contributions to and leadership in visualization and computer graphics" and received the prestigious IEEE Visualization Career Award “for seminal work in the theory and practice of volume visualization."  Kaufman also received the 1995 IEEE Outstanding Contribution Award, 1998 ACM Service Award, 1999 IEEE Computer Society's Meritorious Service Award, 2002 State of New York Entrepreneur Award, 2004 IEEE Harold Wheeler Award, and 2005 State of New York Innovative Research Award and is a member of the European Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Kaufman has conducted research for over 35 years in visualization, graphics, virtual reality, user interfaces, multimedia, and their applications, especially in biomedicine. He has published extensively, totaling in excess of 260 refereed papers, books, and book chapters, more than 220 conference presentations and non-refereed manuscripts, and has been awarded/filed more than 30 patents, most of which have been licensed. He has been a principal/co-principal investigator on more than 90 research grants. His work has been featured in numerous media communications, including Science, New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, Business Week, Wall Street Journal, Saturday Evening Post, PC Week, Good Morning America, Fox TV and Newsday.

Kaufman has made significant research contributions, including: (1) Leading and pioneering volume visualization; (2) Compiling the first manuscript on Volume Visualization (1991); (3) Developing VolVis, a comprehensive volume visualization software, with an installed base of over 3,500; (4) Pioneering the area of Volume Graphics; (5) Developing the Cube hardware architectures for real-time volume rendering, which was the basis for VolumePro; (6) Developing 3D Virtual Colonoscopy, a technique for colon cancer screening; (7) Developing real-time simulation and visualization of flow, especially for airborne dispersion in urban environments.

Kaufman's service to the visualization/graphics community has been very significant. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of  IEEE Transaction on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 1995-1998. He has been the co-founder, papers/program co-chair, and member of the steering committee of IEEE Visualization Conference series; co-founder/chair of Volume Graphics Workshopseries; co-Chair for Eurographics/SIGGRAPH Graphics Hardware Workshops, the Papers/Program co-Chair for ACM Volume Visualization Symposia. He previously chaired and is currently a director of IEEE CS Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics. He has served on over 100 program or technical committees.

He received a BS in Mathematics and Physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, in 1969, an MS in Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, in 1973, and a PhD in Computer Science from the Ben-Gurion University, Israel, in 1977.