engineering

Vivek Goyal

Vivek Goyal is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Vivek Goyal rather than just read about it. In short: Vivek K Goyal is an American engineering professor, author, and inventor. He is currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University (BU).

Key takeaways

Vivek Goyal belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Vivek Goyal to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Vivek Goyal from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Vivek K Goyal is an American engineering professor, author, and inventor. He is currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University (BU). He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2014 and named OSA (now Optica) Fellow in the 2020 class. He was also named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the 2022 class. He is a recipient of a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Education and career Goyal attended Malcolm Price Laboratory School in Cedar Falls, Iowa, through graduation from its Northern University High School division. He received BS and BSE degrees from the University of Iowa in 1993 and MS and PhD degrees from University of California, Berkeley, in 1995 and 1998, respectively. From 1998 to 2000 he served as a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs, and from 2001 to 2003 served as a Senior Research Engineer at Digital Fountain. He returned to UC Berkeley in 2003 as a visiting scholar, and from 2004 to 2013 was with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including holding the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton chair in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He has been with Boston University since 2016, after two years with the Nest Labs division of Alphabet Inc.

Scientific contributions Goyal coauthored the 2014 textbook Foundations of Signal Processing with Martin Vetterli and Jelena Kovačević, which was reviewed in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. In 2013, Goyal's group invented first-photon imaging, a method to generate 3D depth and reflectivity images from exactly one detected photon per pixel, even when up to half of the detected photons are due to ambient light. Publication of an article introducing the method in Science resulted in widespread news coverage. In an article published in Nature in 2019, Goyal's group introduced a method for non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging that uses only an ordinary digital camera. This contrasts with many earlier methods that use pulsed laser illumination and detectors sensitive to single photons. He later collaborated on work that extended laser-based NLOS imaging to 1.43 km stand-off distance. U.S. patents have been issued for 21 of Goyal's inventions.

Awards and honors 1998 Eliahu I. Jury Award of the University of California, Berkeley for outstanding achievement in the area of systems, communications, control, or signal processing 2002 IEEE Signal Processing Society Magazine Award for Multiple Description Coding: Compression Meets the Network 2013 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition Launch Contest Grand Prize for 3dim 2014 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing Best Paper Award IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer 2017-2018 2017 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award for Message-Passing De-Quantization with Applications to Compressed Sensing 2018 IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography Best Poster Award 2019 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award for Photon-Efficient Computational 3D and Reflectivity Imaging with Single-Photon Detectors 2020 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award for A Few Photons Among Many: Unmixing Signal and Noise for Photon-Efficient Active Imaging (co-author with Joshua Rapp) 2023 Frontiers of Science Award in Computational Optics for Quantum-inspired computational imaging (Science, 2018)

References

External links Vivek Goyal publications indexed by Google Scholar Vivek Goyal at the Mathematics Genealogy Project Vivek Goyal

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Vivek Goyal

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Vivek Goyal claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Vivek Goyal before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Vivek Goyal ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Vivek Goyal

In research: Vivek Goyal appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Vivek Goyal in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Vivek Goyal is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 20th-century births, American computer scientists, American electrical engineers, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Vivek Goyal outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Vivek Goyal in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Vivek Goyal means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Vivek Goyal out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Vivek Goyal in simple terms?

Vivek K Goyal is an American engineering professor, author, and inventor. He is currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University (BU).

Why does Vivek Goyal matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Vivek Goyal?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Vivek Goyal.