Mike Cyros, Chief Commercial Officer, Allied Vision Technologies, was presented with the 2014 AIA Achievement Award. This prestigious award is the vision and imaging industry's top leadership award. Cyros was nominated by AIA members and was selected from a highly qualified pool of candidates by the AIA Board of Directors. He is being honored for his long history of outstanding contributions to the vision and imaging industry at Allied Vision Technologies, Euresys, and Datacube, as well as helping build AIA into the world's largest vision trade association.

"Mike Cyros embodies what the Achievement Award is all about," said Jeff Burnstein, President of AIA. "In addition to helping the companies he worked for grow into industry leaders, he devoted time to helping the vision industry as a whole by volunteering to his industry association. In fact, not only did he serve for a decade on the AIA Board, including a term as Chair, he also is now completing his term as Chair of AIA's parent group, the Association for Advancing Automation (A3). Mike's contributions to the strategic direction of AIA and A3 were invaluable. I have no doubt that his selection for this award will be cheered by his peers throughout the world, whose respect he has gained for his efforts over the last 25 years."

In accepting the award, Cyros said, "winning the AIA Achievement Award came as a total shock to me, something I never expected. I am deeply honored to be recognized, as the award states, for leadership and outstanding contributions in promoting market acceptance and growth of our industry. I am further humbled to join those who have won the award in previous years, and see this as a challenge to drive even further in the coming years those attributes recognized by such a prestigious award. I would like to dedicate this honor to an early industry pioneer, my first and most impactful mentor in my early career over the course of 15 years who helped shape my involvement in our industry, the late Stanley Karandanis. There is rarely a day that goes by where I don't apply something that was rooted in me by Stan, all the way back to my first days in 1987 when I joined this incredible industry. I'd like to express my deepest appreciation to our Industry, the Association, the AIA Board of Directors, and Members for this recognition."

The annual award, sponsored by the AIA, has been given since 1991 and honors one industry leader for outstanding contributions in promoting market acceptance of industrial and/or scientific imaging. Among the past winners are industry leaders such as John Stack, Zygo Corporation; Robert Steinke, DVT Corporation; Joseph Christenson, Nonin Medical, Inc.; Toshi Hori, GEViCAM; Don Cochran, Pressco Technology Inc.; David Dechow, Aptúra Machine Vision Solutions; the late Dr. Steven Case, CyberOptics Corporation; Dr.-Ing. Norbert Stein, VITRONICS; Dr. Savvas Chamberlain, DALSA Corporation; Perry West, Automated Vision Systems, Inc.; Amir Novini, Applied Vision Company; Pat Costa, RVSI, Inc.; Nello Zuech, Vision Systems International; the late Stan Karandanis, Datacube; Dwight Carlson, Perceptron; Ken Levy, KLA-Tencor; and Dr. Robert Shillman, Cognex Corporation, and Andy Wilson of Vision Systems Design.

The award is presented each year at the AIA's Business Conference, a members-only event that brings key industry executives together for networking, important machine vision business discussions and presentations that explore emerging markets and new technologies.