Rate My Professor Dave Doermann

David Doermann is the SUNY Empire Innovation Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo, where he joined in 2018. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1993, followed by an MS in 1989 from the same institution, and dual BS degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania in 1986. Prior to UB, Doermann served as a Program Manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) from 2014 to 2018, overseeing a $150 million media forensics program addressing image and video manipulation threats to national security. From 1993 to 2018, he was a Research Scientist at the University of Maryland, where he directed the Language and Media Processing Laboratory and advanced document analysis technologies for government applications. Earlier roles include President and Co-Founder of Applied Media Analysis, Inc. (2001-2014) and Royal Academy of Engineering Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the University of Salford (2011-2013). At UB, he directed the Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Institute from 2019 to 2023 and the Engineering Science MS-AI Program from 2019 to 2023.

Doermann's research specializes in document image understanding, video analysis, pattern recognition, computer vision, media forensics, and artificial intelligence, with applications in deep learning, generative adversarial networks, scene text detection, and adversarial AI. He is a Fellow of the IEEE (2014) for contributions to document page imagery analysis and Fellow of the IAPR (2014) for document image analysis and service. Other honors include the DARPA Director's 'Results Matter' award (2016), Award for Excellence from the Under Secretary of Defense (2017), Honorary Doctorate from the University of Oulu (2002), and multiple best paper awards, such as at ICPR (2016, 2012) and DAS (2011). Key publications include the Handbook of Document Image Processing and Recognition (Springer, 2014), 'Script-independent Text Line Segmentation in Freestyle Handwritten Documents' (IEEE TPAMI, 2008), and 'Geometric Rectification of Camera-captured Document Images' (IEEE TPAMI, 2008). He founded and served as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (1995-2005) and Managing Editor thereafter. Doermann has testified before Congress on deepfakes and contributes to committees like the DARPA ISAT Study Group and SUNY AI Task Force.