He is a faculty member in the UT-Austin Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Machine Learning Laboratory, the Institute for Neuroscience, and the Wireless Networking and Communications Group.

Bovik received a Primetime Emmy Award in 2015 for his development of perception-based video quality measurement tools that are now standards in television production.

[1] He also received a Technology and Engineering Emmy Award in 2021 for the “development of perceptual metrics for video encoding optimization.”[2] Al Bovik was educated at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (PhD 1984).

His picture and video quality models SSIM, MS-SSIM, VIF, VMAF, MOVIE, BRISQUE, FUNQUE, NIQE, ChipQA, and HDRMAX currently process a significant percentage of all bits transmitted both in the United States as well as globally, and are implemented in commercial cable, satellite, broadcast, streaming video, television, home cinema / disc, and social media quality monitoring and control workflows around the world.

Bovik's academic legacy includes serving as the supervising professor of more than 70 PhD graduates, more than 50 master's degree recipients, and more than two dozen post-doctoral researchers.