My journey as an IEEE volunteer

I have been an IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) member for over 30 years. I have served SPS in many roles, including President-Elect (2024-2025), inaugural Vice President for Membership, Editor-in-Chief, and General Co-Chair for its flagship conferences. I aim to empower our SPS members to advance their careers, increase our appeal to the industry and service to industry professionals, further promote our technical excellence, and improve operational efficiency.

Who am I?

IEEE: I have served as the inaugural Vice President membership for the Signal Processing Society (2013-2016), IEEE Signal Processing Letters Editor-in-Chief (2009-2011), 2017 GlobalSIP, 2018 International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP2018), and 2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP2021) co-Chair. I serve as the co-chair for ICASSP2027. During my tenure as Vice President, SPS membership has constantly increased, especially in student and graduate student grades; many member-driven initiatives were introduced, and most of our affinity groups were established.

Entrepreneur: I am a registered professional engineer with first-hand engagement and a keen appreciation of industry and academia. I co-founded Medical Cytometrix Inc. My research led to technology commercialization, including intellectual property transfer to industry, patent licensing (machine intelligence start-up), HURON Digital Pathology (computational pathology), and Canadian government (Crown – Department of National Defence, Canada).

Professor: I am a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and the Bell Canada Chair Professor in Multimedia since 2014 at the University of Toronto (UofT), which ranks in the top 20 global research universities. I am the Director for the Machine Intelligence Major at UofT's elite Engineering Science program. My research group conducts research encompassing broad areas of machine learning, adaptive systems, image processing, and biomedical signal processing.

Awards/Honors: I am humbled to see my work capturing the attention of my peers (Google Scholar: Citations: 29,000 +, h-index: 83, i10-index:350). Research.com recognizes me as a leading researcher, ranked 550 globally and 33rd in electrical and electronics engineering in Canada. I also rank 913 globally and 34 in Canada in computer science (2023 Edition). I am a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada, and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. I received the J.M. Ham IEEE Canada Outstanding Engineering Educator Award, the 2006 IEEE Trans. on Neural Networks Best Paper Award and a 2018 IET paper award.