Richard Baraniuk

Activist, Educator/Teacher, Engineer, Idea generator, Inventor, Musician, Parent, Scientist, Startup, Technologist

Richard G. Baraniuk is the C. Sidney Burrus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University and the Founding Director of OpenStax. His research interests lie in new theory, algorithms, and hardware for sensing, signal processing, machine learning, and AI. He holds 40 granted US and 6 foreign patents, 6 of which have been licensed to Siemens to radically accelerate magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Dr. Baraniuk is also one of the founders of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement that promotes the development and use of free and open-source-licensed textbooks, courses, and learning materials. OpenStax (formerly Connexions) is a non-profit educational publisher that provides free and open access to a library of high-quality, peer-reviewed, digital textbooks. During the 2021-22 school year, OpenStax's 47 texts were used by 6.5M students and 16,000 faculty at 68% of all US colleges and universities. Since 2012, 25 million students have saved $1.7B. Dr. Baraniuk is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and IEEE. He has received the DOD Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow Award (National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow), the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award, the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education, and the IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal, among others.

Open education, free textbooks, signal processing, machine learning, AI, and engineering

OpenStax (openstax.org) is a non-profit initiative of Rice University that aims to improve both the access to high-quality educational experiences and learning outcomes. Building on 23 years of experience in open education resources (OER), OpenStax is publishing a library of free, open, professional-quality textbooks for the most highly enrolled college courses. During the 2021-22 school year, OpenStax's 47 texts were used by 6.5M students and 16,000 faculty at 68% of all US colleges and universities. Since 2012, 25 million students have saved $1.7B.

AI, machine learning, OER, Open education, signal processing

I was lucky to speak about Connexions and the Open Education movement at TED 06. The talk is up at https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_baraniuk_the_birth_of_the_open_source_learning_revolution