Jan. 8, 2016
Professor Dimitrios Hatzinakos of The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering has been elevated to the prestigious grade of Fellow by the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is elected “for contributions to signal processing techniques for communications, multimedia and biometrics.”
The IEEE is the world’s largest professional association, with more than 430,000 members worldwide. The distinction of Fellow recognizes those IEEE members who have made “extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest.” The grade is conferred upon less than one-tenth of one per cent of the total voting IEEE membership in a given year.
“It’s a great feeling to join this group of peers,” says Professor Hatzinakos, who was elevated with the 2016 cohort. “Not only because it’s a very prestigious award, but because it recognizes the totality of your work, rather than one specific accomplishment.”
Professor Hazinakos’s current work looks at signal processing techniques for both biometrics and sensor networks, as well as privacy and security—fields that still hold excitement and intrigue for him. As a PhD student at Northeastern University in Boston, Mass., he worked on more traditional communications systems, developing blind equalization techniques for de-noising signals without explicit training on their channel characteristics. After joining the University of Toronto in 1990, as multimedia became a hot area of research, he shifted his focus to similar blind de-noising techniques for image processing and security, including steganography and biomedical image processing.
“It was a natural progression toward biometric signal processing, and I’ve been working on that ever since,” he says.
Professor Hatzinakos joins 27 faculty members, including Emeritus Professors, of The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering who currently hold the grade of IEEE Fellow.
“Congratulations to Professor Hatzinakos on this significant career accomplishment,” says ECE Chair Professor Farid Najm. “He is indisputably a leader in his field, and it’s fitting to see him so recognized by his peers.”
More information:
Marit Mitchell
Senior Communications Officer
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
416-978-7997; marit.mitchell@utoronto.ca