Short Biography

Bert is a Professor at the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He initiated and now serves as director of the Master of Science program in Electronic Engineering. He is a member of the Human Language Technology and Automation Technology centers. Between 2001-2008, he was Director of the Consumer Media Laboratory.

His research interests are in bio-inspired and neuromorphic engineering, analog VLSI and cellular neural networks, machine vision, and image processing. Most recently, his research team has been building large-scale neuromorphic implementations of functional models of visual cortical neurons using either mixed-signal custom VLSI chip, or embedded system designs using DSP and FPGA chips. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE in for his contributions to the analysis, implementation and application of cellular neural networks. He is currently serving his second term as a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. For the past eight years, he has organized or co-organized the Vision Chips/Vision Systems workgroup at the Telluride Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop.

Bert has been both an Associate and a Guest Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-I. He helped found the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Technical Committee on Cellular Neural Networks and Array Computing, serving as its first Secretary and later as Chairman. He was Technical Program Chair for the 2004 IEEE International Workshop on Cellular Neural Networks and their Applications, and was the General Chair in 2005.

He received the B.S. with distinction and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.