Anastasios (Tas) N. Venetsanopoulos, University of Toronto
The signal processing landscape has become vastly changed with the advent of high speed communications systems which permit the transmission of more than just voice and signaling data, but also images, video and virtually all possible data combinations. This multimedia communication environment has resulted in the need for new and different processing tools and applications, aimed at providing increased efficiency, convenience, productivity and flexibility. In this talk, a broad overview of multimedia and its impact will be provided. The challenges which arise in our specific area of multimedia, that of Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) will be presented and some areas of application in relation to MPEG-7 will be discussed.
Dr. Anastasios (Tas) N. Venetsanopoulos received the Bachelors of Engineering degree from the National Technical University in Athens (NTU), Greece, in 1965, and the M.S., P.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Yale University in 1966, 1968, and 1969 respectively. He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, Canada, in September 1968 and was appointed Inaugural Chairholder of The Bell Canada Chair in Multimedia in 1999. Between 2001-2006 he was the Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering of the University of Toronto.
He has published over 800 papers on digital signal and image processing and digital communications and has served as Chair on numerous boards, councils and technical conference committees including IEEE committees such as the Toronto Section (1977-1979) and the IEEE Central Canada Council (1980-1982); he was President of the Canadian Society for Electrical Engineering and Vice-President of the Engineering Institute of Canada (1983-1986). He was Guest Editor and Associate Editor for numerous IEEE journals, and the Editor of the Canadian Electrical Engineering Journal (1981-1983).
He is a member of the IEEE Communications, Circuits and Systems, Computer, and Signal Processing Societies, as well as a member of Sigma Xi, the Technical Chamber of Greece, the European Association of Signal Processing, and the Association of Professional Engineers of Ontario (PEO). He was elected as a Fellow of the IEEE “for contributions to digital signal and image processing”, Fellow of EIC, “for contributions to electrical engineering”, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the National Technical University of Athens, in October 1994. In October 1996, he was awarded the “Excellence in Innovation Award” of the Information Technology Research Centre of Ontario and Royal Bank of Canada, “for innovative work in colour image processing and its industrial applications”. In 2003, he was awarded the IEEE MacNaughton Medal, “for outstanding contributions to the design and implementation of communication systems, digital filters and multimedia systems; IEEE; the engineering profession and society at large”. In 2006 he was selected as the joint recipient of the 2003 IEEE Transactions On Neural Networks Outstanding Paper Award.