Alfred Hero is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Alfred Hero was awarded the University of Michigan Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award (2011) and the Stephen S. Attwood Excellence in Engineering Award (2017). He has been plenary and keynote speaker at several workshops and conferences. He has received several best paper awards including: an IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award (1998), a Best Original Paper Award from the Journal of Flow Cytometry (2008), a Best Magazine Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2010), a SPIE Best Student Paper Award (2011), an IEEE ICASSP Best Student Paper Award (2011), an AISTATS Notable Paper Award (2013), and an IEEE ICIP Best Paper Award (2013). He received an IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award (1998), an IEEE Third Millenium Medal (2000), an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturership (2002), the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award (2014), and the Society Award, which is the highest career award bestowed by the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2015). He was President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2006-2007). He was a member of the IEEE TAB Society Review Committee (2009), the IEEE Awards Committee (2010-2011), and served on the Board of Directors of the IEEE (2009-2011) as Director of Division IX (Signals and Applications). He served on the IEEE TAB Nominations and Appointments Committee (2012-2014). Alfred Hero is currently a member of the Big Data Special Interest Group (SIG) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Since 2011 he has been a member of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CATS) of the US National Academies of Science, , which he now chairs.
Alfred Hero's recent research interests are in high dimensional spatio-temporal data, multi-modal data integration, statistical signal processing, and machine learning. Of particular interest are applications to social networks, network security and forensics, computer vision, and personalized health.