ANN ARBOR, MI-David Dechow, president of Aptúra Machine Vision Solutions, is the recipient of the 2007 Automated Imaging Achievement (AIA) Award. The award, which was presented to Dechow by the AIA in February at the annual AIA Business Conference in Orlando, FL, honors industry leaders for outstanding contributions in industrial and scientific imaging.

Dechow founded Aptúra Machine Vision Solutions in 2003; the company serves customers in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the Pacific Rim. Aptúra specializes in general purpose machine vision integration, and keeps up technologically with the expansion of the machine vision component market, including smart cameras and sensors, embedded smart cameras, 3-D technologies, and PC-based machine vision including Camera Link and GigE Vision cameras.

He served on the AIA board of directors for 14 years, including a two-year term as president and a term as a member of the Automation Technologies Council (ATC) governing board. He joins past winners including Dr. Steven Case, CyberOptics Corp.; Dr.-Ing. Norbert Stein of Vitronics; Dr. Savvas Chamberlain of Dalsa; Perry West of Automated Vision Systems Inc.; Amir Novini of Applied Vision Co.; Nello Zuech of Vision Systems International; Dwight Carlson, formerly of Perceptron; Dr. Robert Shillman of Cognex; Ken Levy of KLA-Tencor and Pat Costa of RVSI Inc.

The 16th annual AIA Business Conference will be held January 30 to February 1, 2008, in Orlando, FL. Nominations for the 2008 Achievement Award are now being accepted; a nomination form can be found at www.machinevisiononline.org.