computer engineering

Meet the Emmy-winning engineer whose algorithms are behind your Netflix binge

Charles Ferrer — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:32:51 +0000

Meet the Emmy-winning engineer whose algorithms are behind your Netflix binge Charles Ferrer Tue, 04/21/2026 - 08:32

Charles Ferrer

Photo Credit: Jesse Petersen

Every time you hit play on a video, chances are you have Al Bovik to thank for its visual quality.

Bovik, professor and Provost’s Chair in Engineering in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, has spent decades developing algorithms that now influence nearly 80% of internet and social media content.

At the center is digital visual perception, or using the neuroscience of human vision to make streamed video look as sharp and natural as possible. His work is used by familiar brands like Netflix, Amazon and YouTube.

Understanding not just how cameras capture patterns of light, Bovik explains, but how the brain interprets it is an important element that drives his research.

“The question that really gripped me over time was: can we model mathematically how we see?” Bovik says. “That’s a very different and much harder problem.”

His achievements in visual perception processing has landed him two Emmys: a Primetime Emmy Engineering Award for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development and a Technology and Engineering Emmy from the Academies of Television Arts and Sciences. They also earned him the IEEE Edison Medal, which he shares with Alexander Graham Bell, Nikola Tesla and Ray Dolby.

We sat down with Bovik to discuss his career, the neuroscience hiding behind your favorite TV or movie and why his proudest achievement isn’t just theories and algorithms.

For someone outside the field, how would you describe what digital processing is?

At its simplest, image processing is about manipulating visual information using computations. Digital processing involves inventing theories and algorithms to help make television and movies more efficient, faster and higher quality. What I do is more than that. It is modeling the visual parts of the brain mathematically, then using those models to create algorithms for better photography, TV shows and movies.

What first drew you toward the field of digital processing?

I’m a deeply visual person. Whenever I travel, the first place I go is an art museum. If I go a week without seeing a movie, I go into withdrawal. I’m a visual, spatial thinker and suddenly here was a field that lived at the intersection of mathematics and how we see the world. Then I took an image processing class from Thomas Huang, one of the inventors of image compression, and everything changed overnight. I knew immediately: This is what I want to do. I’ve never looked back.

What does the science of human vision reveal about how we see digital content?

We know that image processing happens in various brain centers, including the primary visual cortex — the very back of the brain. Vision requires processing an enormous amount of raw information, compressing it into concise, efficient representations that the brain can use to recognize a car on the highway or track a bird in flight. We can model that mathematically and start exploring questions like why do we look where we look, or where does your gaze land when you’re driving? The same holds true in videos — your eyes are directed to certain areas when viewing a particular scene.

What are the acclaimed algorithms that you innovated, ones people don’t necessarily notice?

We created a variety of algorithms used throughout the streaming and social media industries. These algorithms use mathematical models of how visual distortions are perceived in the human brain, using them to predict how a human will rate the visual quality of a picture or video. For example, they are widely used to control the compression of television and movies streamed worldwide. Compression is necessary since videos are huge and would not be practically streamable otherwise. One of them, called structural similarity (SSIM), allows the big streamers and social media platforms to compress content as much as possible to the point just before noticeable distortions appear. Engineers at companies like Netflix, Meta Platforms, Amazon and YouTube use this technology.

Can you walk us through what’s happening technically when someone presses play on Netflix?

Let’s say you’re watching Stranger Things. The moment you start a scene, up in the cloud, approximately 20 different versions of that scene have already been prepared, each compressed a different amount, each perceptually optimized using our algorithms. Some are also spatially downsampled: A 4K video might have versions encoded at 2K or even lower resolution.

Your device, whether it’s on your phone or TV, measures the available bandwidth, which changes constantly, especially if someone is on the move in a city with tall buildings and requests whichever of those 20 versions best fits your current conditions. This happens scene by scene, continuously.

Here’s the part that surprises most people: You might think you’re watching 4K, but if your bandwidth is constrained, you might actually be receiving a heavily compressed 2K version that’s been decompressed and upsampled back to 4K on your TV. Visually, you can’t tell the difference because of our video quality algorithms.

Your algorithms also help determine how much video can be compressed before viewers notice a difference. How does that work?

Another algorithm we developed, called visual information fidelity, or VIF, predicts how a person will perceive the quality of a video after it has been compressed. It tells the Netflix video quality system the point where distortions may be visible. Netflix’s video streaming is built on these neuroscience principles and sometimes I say that they have now become a visual neuroscience company.

Professor Al Bovik and two former PhD students at the 2015 Primetime Emmy Engineering Awards ceremony.

How did your first successful model, structural similarity, come about?

Almost by accident, honestly. My students and I were working on video compression, and we ran into a fundamental problem: How do you even measure whether your results are good? How does a human perceive the quality of a picture? Nobody had really solved that, and most researchers thought it was unsolvable. So we built our own model. We were amazed when the entire television industry noticed and adopted it. The streaming world discovered it early while they were wrestling with the question of how much to compress video before it starts looking distorted to a viewer. This was especially important since the new wireless/smartphone systems had very limited bandwidth. SSIM gave them a way to find that compression point and deliver perceptually compressed videos to everyone. Every photo uploaded to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Reels is now optimized using a model rooted in visual neuroscience. We had successfully introduced the principles of visual neuroscience throughout the internet.

You’ve also worked with Meta for nearly a decade on virtual and augmented reality. What does that world look like?

It’s one of the most exciting problems I’ve worked on. Imagine wearing advanced AR glasses here in Colorado, while your colleague is wearing a similar pair in Paris. You can see each other in 3D, in real time, as if you’re in the same room. The challenge is that the display is an inch from your eye, so you need a far denser resolution, perhaps 8K or 16K, which means vastly more data to compress and transmit. Our approach is the avatar model: rather than sending a live 3D video feed, you build a photo realistic 3D model of the person which is stored on your friend’s AR glasses, and only transmit their facial movements determined by cameras and image processing in your own glasses, which requires far less bandwidth. The 3D avatar is animated in real time on the receiving end.

What are you most proud of during your teaching career and working partnering with some of the largest digital giants?

I ask myself, “Am I giving my students the best possible opportunities?” My students are not just programmers, and they’re not just video engineers. They’re also trained as visual psychologists and neuroscientists. The thing I’m most proud of is the successes of my students. The Netflix video team is largely composed of students from our Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE). What matters most to me are the people who came through this lab and went on to shape an industry. No less than six of my students have Emmy statuettes on their shelves at work or home. If I were to ask myself why I’m here at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder, that’s the answer, along with living in the Colorado mountains!

What’s an aspect that people may not realize about your work in image processing?

The internet now accounts for nearly 10% of global carbon emissions, and that’s growing fast. Our algorithms help reduce internet video data volume, which is 80% of internet traffic, by nearly 25%. By reducing the amount of data moving through global networks, we are shaving off a meaningful fraction of that footprint, and the ecological impact is real.

Burning question: Do you have a favorite movie and show that has used your algorithm?

Pretty much any movie or TV show I watch will be processed by these algorithms. These would include British Mystery shows like Broadchurch, Grace and Prime Suspect, which my wife and I watch all the time, and movies with great acting, cinematography and directing, like The Godfather, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Spartacus, Gladiator and many more. This year, I especially liked Sinners and One Battle After Another.

Two-time Emmy‑winning electrical engineer Al Bovik shares how his algorithms shape the visual quality of nearly 80% of streamed video worldwide. By combining neuroscience with engineering, his work impacts some of the largest digital platforms behind your TV or movie binge.

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder to host International Workshop on Biodesign Automation this June

Charles Ferrer — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:55:56 +0000

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder to host International Workshop on Biodesign Automation this June Charles Ferrer Wed, 04/08/2026 - 09:55

Charles Ferrer

The �鶹��Ѱ�� will host the 18th annual International Workshop on Biodesign Automation (IWBDA) on June 18-20. IWBDA will be held immediately following the Synthetic Biology: Engineering, Evolution & Design (SEED) Conference, which will be held in Denver from June 15-18.

Graduate and undergraduate students at a synthetic biology outreach event led by the Genetic Logic Lab at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder.

“Hosting IWBDA is a great opportunity for our faculty and students to engage with world-class researchers and industry leaders in the emerging field of synthetic biology,” said Chris Myers, department chair of electrical, computer and energy engineering. “We look forward to forming new collaborations that will move this exciting field forward.”

Synthetic biology involves redesigning organisms for useful purposes by engineering them to have new abilities. Scientists around the world are harnessing synthetic biology to solve the pressing problems in medicine, manufacturing and agriculture.

For example, microorganisms can be engineered to clean pollutants from water, soil and air that are essential in the fight against environmental contamination. In agriculture, scientists have modified rice to produce beta-carotene, a nutrient typically associated with carrots, helping to prevent vitamin A deficiency in populations that rely heavily on rice as a dietary staple.

However, synthetic biology faces a significant challenge where the field has lagged behind other industries when it comes to adopting computational and digital solutions. Unlike software engineering, where standardized tools and workflows are common, biological systems are highly complex and variable. A solution that works for one organism or process often must be completely redesigned for another.

This is where biodesign automation (BDA) comes in. BDA applies the principles of engineering and computer science to streamline and accelerate biological research and development.

By developing innovative software tools, standardized components and automated workflows, researchers aim to make synthetic biology faster, more reproducible and accessible.

IWBDA pushes the mission forward bringing synthetic biology, systems biology and design automation communities together for stronger collaboration.

What to expect at the SEED conference

Synthetic Biology: Engineering, Evolution & Design (SEED) is the premier technical conference for the synthetic biology community, serving as a global venue to share transformative breakthroughs across academia and industry.

Attending SEED 2026

Who: Open to the public
When: Monday, June 15- Thursday, June 18
Where: Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center
Registration: Required

The conference highlights how advances such as artificial intelligence and biological engineering are accelerating the field faster than ever.

Covering synthetic biology from its scientific foundations to its commercial applications, SEED offers attendees insight into development strategies from leaders in research, biomanufacturing and product innovation.

Whether participants focus on research and development, commercialization or bringing discoveries into real-world impact, SEED provides significant networking opportunities for those engaged in the synthetic biology community.

By attending both SEED and IWBDA, participants gain an opportunity to engage in technical workshops, as well as hands-on design automation strategies for individuals in research, academic and industry.

Get the scoop about IWBDA 2026

IWBDA aims to bring academic researchers and industry partners together to lead the field of biodesign automation for synthetic biology forward.

Attending IWBDA 2026
Who: Researchers, faculty, students, industry
When: Thursday, June 18 to Saturday, June 20
Where: KOBL 352 / ECCS 201
Registration: Required

This year’s IWBDA workshop, led by the Department of Electrical, Computer & Energy Engineering (ECEE), takes place immediately following the SEED conference, held in Boulder which is less than 40 miles from Denver, making the two events a natural pairing for attendees traveling to Colorado for the week.

IWBDA will include presentations and poster talks selected from submitted abstracts, Birds of a Feather discussions and interactive breakout sessions.

Topics will span artificial intelligence and machine learning in synthetic biology, biosecurity considerations in lab automation, the growing role of biofoundries, computer-aided design tools and synthetic biology education and outreach.

Keynote speakers include Dr. Domitilla Del Vecchio of MIT and Dr. Emma J. Chory of Duke University, both prominent researchers in the intersection of engineering and biological sciences.

Hands-on tutorials

Attending IWBDA Tutorials

Who: Researchers, faculty, students, industry
When: Saturday, June 13 to Sunday, June 14
Where: KOBL 352
Registration: Required (fee can be waived for �鶹��Ѱ��students)

For those who want to dive deeper before the main workshop, IWBDA tutorials will be held June 13-14 in Boulder.

These two days hands-on sessions are designed to give faculty, researchers, industry members and students practical experience with synthetic biology software tools and to close the gap between tool developers and experimental biologists.

Parallel tracks will be offered for both users and developers, allowing attendees to tailor their experience to their skill level and interests.

The user track will guide participants through a complete synthetic biology workflow using open-source tools, while the developer track will introduce libraries and resources for building standard-enabled synthetic biology software.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder will host the 18th International Workshop on Biodesign Automation (IWBDA), June 18–20, following the SEED Conference in Denver. The workshop brings together researchers and industry leaders advancing biodesign automation in synthetic biology.

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Izraelevitz aims to make complex memory technologies visible to programmers with CAREER Award

Anonymous — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 22:22:36 +0000

Izraelevitz aims to make complex memory technologies visible to programmers with CAREER Award Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/05/2023 - 16:22

Emily Adams

Joe Izraelevitz

Much like computing itself, the landscape of computer memory is rapidly changing. In addition to random-access memory (RAM), caches and hard drives, we now have technologies like non-volatile memory, non-uniform memory access and encrypted memory.

The problem, according to Assistant Professor Joe Izraelevitz of the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, is that this new memory landscape is not visible to the programmers who are writing code for today’s machines.

“There are these distinctions about memory that the programmer might not be aware of,” he said. “There are actually a lot of layers in between the processor and memory.”

Izraelevitz plans to use a recent CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to begin providing that visibility. He wants to develop extensions to programming languages that would allow coders to explicitly control where data is stored.

He uses the example of network-accessible memory, which is directly readable by a remote computer. Programmers wouldn’t want to rely on that type of memory for sensitive data, but they currently have to trust the hardware to make the best decision about where to store information. They may also need to know about persistent memory, which helps assure that data isn’t lost in a power outage.

“We’re looking at how to expose this complicated landscape to the programmer in an efficient way,” Izraelevitz said. “By agreeing on a common language between the programmer and the rest of the stack, we can enforce that and make the programmer say, ‘I want this secret’ or ‘I want this persistent.’ Then we can take action through the compiler.”

He said these memory challenges have existed for a while, but the penalty for not solving them has mainly been performance issues, rather than safety and data security.

“I can't just assume the hardware is going to do the right thing,” Izraelevitz said. “The downside of it guessing wrong isn’t a performance hit. It's data loss or secrets lost or data inaccessible.”

Izraelevitz, who served as a U.S. Army officer between finishing his undergraduate degree and starting his PhD, believes that intersection with security makes the research area a promising one for those with a military background. He plans to use part of the CAREER Award to provide financial support to students on a GI Bill who need to build their technical skills with a master’s degree before pursuing their PhD.

Izraelevitz earned his PhD from the University of Rochester and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California San Diego before joining the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder faculty in 2019. He also completed research internships at Oracle and HP Labs, as well as a limited-stay postdoc at IMDEA Software in Madrid.

CAREER Awards provide approximately $500,000 over five years for junior faculty members “who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.” In addition to the funding provided, Izraelevitz said the award was a chance to reflect on the future trajectory of his research.

“It's an interesting exercise to write this grant proposal because I've been forced to think so long term about where to go with my research,” he said. “It makes you really think about where the research, technology, science and industry are going and how you can have an impact there.”

Assistant Professor Joe Izraelevitz of the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering will use a prestigious NSF CAREER to develop extensions to programming languages that would allow programmers to explicitly control where data is stored.

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder lands $750K research grant for 5G communications security

Anonymous — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 15:27:06 +0000

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder lands $750K research grant for 5G communications security Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/24/2022 - 09:27

Two ECEE researchers are involved in a unique military-oriented project to enable secure use of 5G networks that may be controlled by an adversary.

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Wustrow will use CAREER Award to fight Internet censorship

Anonymous — Mon, 09 May 2022 20:17:04 +0000

Wustrow will use CAREER Award to fight Internet censorship Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 05/09/2022 - 14:17

Emily Adams

When Assistant Professor Eric Wustrow began studying ways to combat Internet censorship as a graduate student, he thought it would be a short-lived project. He said he expected governments to see that censoring the Internet was not a viable long-term solution and give up their efforts.

“I could not have been more wrong about that,” he said. “Since then, censors have doubled down on their efforts and have made more sophisticated and more complex infrastructure to block and censor the internet. It's been fascinating to watch that evolve and find ways to circumvent it.”

Wustrow, who is based in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, recently received a CAREER Award, a $569,000, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation to further his computer engineering research into how censorship can be fought from within networks.

As of 2018, over half of Internet users worldwide lived in countries that censor political, social or religious content online, Wustrow explained. And because much of the research into censorship relies on in-country vantage points, the censors hold the upper hand – they can see what is being monitored and more easily block circumvention tools like proxy servers.

To level that playing field, Wustrow plans to deploy passive measurement and circumvention tools at Internet service providers (ISPs) outside of the censoring countries.

Those passive taps will allow his team to observe tell-tale signs of censorship, such as prematurely terminated connections and “missing” expected traffic. They can then use that information to better camouflage circumvention tools, with protocols, packet sizes, timings and configurations that mimic “normal,” non-censored traffic.

The new techniques build on some of Wustrow’s previous successes with refraction networking, which today supports Internet freedom for more than 1 million users, with the backing of the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

“I've always been really passionate about finding ways to apply engineering and security principles for good, helping people to get autonomy and access to information in places where they otherwise wouldn't,” Wustrow said.

To share that passion with others, his CAREER proposal includes developing an undergraduate course in censorship circumvention and creating video content for non-technical audiences – including translated versions targeted toward those in censored countries. Wustrow also looks forward to continuing to collaborate with others on the legal, policy and human rights sides of Internet freedom.

The CAREER award is the most prestigious program for early career faculty by the National Science Foundation. It is designed to support junior faculty members “who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.” Six faculty members from the College of Engineering and Applied Science received NSF CAREER Awards in 2022.

With the $569,000, five-year grant from the NSF, he plans to explore how censorship can be fought from within networks using passive measurement and circumvention tools at Internet service providers (ISPs).

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Research in Focus: How Tamara Silbergleit Lehman balances security and performance

Anonymous — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 20:34:22 +0000

Research in Focus: How Tamara Silbergleit Lehman balances security and performance Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 01/05/2022 - 13:34

In her computer engineering lab, Assistant Professor Tamara Silbergleit Lehman and her team are exploring ways to make computing devices more secure, while also maintaining performance.

“We all love the way that our phones work — as fast as we need them to and as responsive as we need them to,” she says. “But that doesn’t really matter if you can’t trust your device.”

They focus on security at the hardware level, including a new project on how to prevent attacks on the GPUs in health diagnostic devices.

Check out the video to learn more about what she looks for in her graduate students and the “happy, collaborative” environment students will find in electrical, computer and energy engineering at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder.

[video:https://youtu.be/reL_mClsKkY]

In her computer engineering lab, Assistant Professor Tamara Silbergleit Lehman and her team are exploring ways to make computing devices more secure, while also maintaining performance.

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computer engineering

Meet the Emmy-winning engineer whose algorithms are behind your Netflix binge

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�鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder to host International Workshop on Biodesign Automation this June

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Izraelevitz aims to make complex memory technologies visible to programmers with CAREER Award

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�鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder lands $750K research grant for 5G communications security

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Wustrow will use CAREER Award to fight Internet censorship

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Research in Focus: How Tamara Silbergleit Lehman balances security and performance

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder to host International Workshop on Biodesign Automation this June

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder lands $750K research grant for 5G communications security