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Biographies of Speakers for the MITACS Seminar Series on Camera Networks and Decentralized Processing
Erik Blasch
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Biography: For the last 8 years Erik Blasch was the Information Fusion Evaluation Tech Lead for the United States Air
Force Research Laboratory - COMprehensive Performance Assessment of Sensor Exploitation
(COMPASE) Center (AFRL/RYAA), Adjunct Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering Professor in
at Wright State University (WSU) and Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT), and a reserve Maj with the
Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFRL/AFOSR). He was a founding member of the International
Society of Information Fusion (ISIF) in 1998 and the 2007 ISIF President (www.isif.org ). Dr. Blasch has
many civilian career awards; but engineering highlights include team member of the winning 91
American Tour del Sol solar car competition, 94 AIAA mobile robotics contest, and the 93 Aerial
Unmanned Vehicle competition where they were first in the world to autonomously control a helicopter
mostly with a focus on image and signals fusion for vehicle control. Since that time, Dr. Blasch has
focused on Automatic Target Recognition, Simultaneous Target Tracking and Identification, and
Information Fusion solutions to augment users needs compiling 300+ scientific papers and book
chapters. He is active in ISIF, IEEE (AES and SMC) and SPIE including regional activities, conference
boards, journal reviews, and scholarship committees; and participates in various Information Fusion
Working Groups. Dr. Blasch received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering/Economics (92) from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Masters Degrees in Mechanical (94), Health Science(94), and
Industrial Engineering(95) from Georgia Tech and attended University of Wisconsin for an MD/PHD in
Mech. Eng/Neurosciences until being called to Active Duty in the United States Air Force. He completed
an MSEE(97), MBA (98), MS Econ(99), MS/PhD Psychology (ABD), PhD in Electrical Engineering (99) from
Wright State University and Air War College (08). He has numerous military honors, winner of the IEEE
Russ Bioengineering Award, and is a Fellow of SPIE.
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Nigel Boston
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Biography: Nigel Boston grew up in England and attended Cambridge and
Harvard. His postdoctoral work in Paris and Berkeley was followed by 12
years at the University of Illinois, except for six months as Rosenbaum
Fellow at the Newton Institute in Cambridge, UK, when he witnessed
Wiles's announcement of a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In recent
years he moved towards engineering, becoming founding director of the
Illinois Center for Cryptography and Information Protection. In 2002, he
was hired by the University of Wisconsin - Madison as part of the
computational sciences cluster, with joint appointments in Mathematics
and Electrical and Computer Engineering. Since August 2006, he has been
on leave from UW as Williams-Hedberg-Hedberg Chair at the University of
South Carolina.
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Alexandre Cervinka
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Biography: Alexandre Cervinka graduated with a B. Eng in Electrical Engineering from McGill in 2001. After graduation,
he founded and became CEO of Newtrax Technologies, Inc. Newtrax Technologies Inc. is
a Montreal based company specializing in self-contained wireless electronic systems designed to last years on batteries
in harsh industrial environments.
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John Fisher III
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Biography: John Fisher is Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory. His research focuses on information?theoretic approaches to machine learning, computer
vision, and signal processing. Application areas include signal?level approaches to multi?modal data
fusion, signal and image processing in sensor networks, distributed inference under resource
constraints, resource management in sensor networks, and analysis of seismic and radar images.
In collaboration with the Surgical Planning Lab at Brigham and Women's Hospital, he is developing
nonparametric approaches to image registration and functional imaging.
He received a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering at the University of Florida in 1987 and 1989,
respectively. He earned a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1997.
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Alex Ihler
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Biography: Alex Ihler received his BS degree in electrical engineering and
mathematics from Caltech, and MS and PhD degrees from MIT in the
Stochastic Systems Group of the Laboratory for Information and Decision
Systems. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Donald Brin School of Information and Computer
Science at U.C. Irvine. His interests include statistical estimation and modeling, machine learning,
communications and information theory, and embedded, distributed systems.
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George Kesidis
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Biography: George Kesidis received his M.S. and Ph.D. in EECS from U.C. Berkeley in 1990 and 1992
respectively. He was a professor in the ECE Dept of the University of Waterloo, Canada, from
1992 to 2000. Since 2000, he has taught in both the CSE and EE Depts of the Pennsylvania State
University. His research experience spans several areas of computer/communication
networking (including security, incentive engineering, traffic engineering, and efficient
simulation) and, more recently, areas of machine learning and associated optimization
problems. He served as the TPC co-chair of IEEE INFOCOM 2007 and is now serving on the
editorial board of IEEE Journal on Communications Surveys and Tutorials. Currently, he a senior
member of the IEEE.
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Patrick Kreidl
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Biography: Pat Kreidl received the S.B. degree in Electrical Engineering (1994, with highest distinction and a
physics minor) from George Mason University (GMU), Fairfax, VA, and the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees
in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (1996 and 2008, respectively) from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA.
Currently a research affiliate in the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, Pat has
held teaching assistantships in MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department (1994-
1997, 2002) and an adjunct faculty appointment within GMU's Electrical & Computer Engineering
Department (1998-2001). He has also held research and consulting positions at Alphatech, Inc.,
Burlington, MA (since 1996), the Institute for Defense Analyses, Alexandria, VA (1997), and the U.S.
Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC (1992-1994).
His technical interests include statistical signal processing, stochastic systems & control, numerical
optimization, statistical machine learning, distributed sensor networks and computer network security.
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Zoya Popovic
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Biography: Zoya Popovic is the Hudson Moore Jr. Professor of Electrical Engineering at the
University of Colorado. She obtained her Dipl.Ing. degree at the University of Belgrade,
Serbia, and her Ph.D. at Caltech in 1990. She has graduated 24 PhD students at the
University of Colorado at Boulder and currently advises 16 students in areas of
highefficiency and low-noise microwave circuits, microfabricated millimeter-wave
components and circuits, THz imaging, rf optical techniques, wireless powering of
lowpower sensors and active antenna arrays. She has received two IEEE MTT
Microwave Prizes for best journal papers, and she is also proud of the White House
NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow award, the URSI Issac Koga Gold Medal, the ASEE/HP
Terman Medal and the German Alexander von Humboldt Research Award.
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Faisal Qureshi
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Biography: Faisal Qureshi is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Science at University of Ontario
Institute of Technology (UOIT). He obtained his Ph.D. from University of Toronto in 2007. In his
thesis he developed the virtual vision paradigm for camera network research, and this work
was recognized with a best paper award at the 2005 ACM Workshop on Video Surveillance and
Sensor Networks. In 2007/2008 he worked with Autodesk as part of the modeling team for
AliasStudio, a leading automotive and industrial design application. His research interests
include behavior?based computer animation, autonomous characters for computer animation
and games, autonomous agent architectures, and cognitive vision.
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Ali Rahimi
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Biography: Ali Rahimi recently joined the Intel Lablet in Seattle, after receiving a PhD from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He develops machine learning techniques for
large scale vision and sensing problems. Most recently, he has been working on realtime
object instance recognition, and on training kernel machines on very large datasets.
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Dr. Ioannis Rekleitis
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Biography: Ioannis Rekleitis is currently at the Canadian Space Agency. During 2004 he was at McGill
University as a Research Associate in the Centre for Intelligent Machines with Professor
Gregory Dudek in the Mobile Robotics Lab (MRL). Between 2002 and 2003, he was a
Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carnegie Mellon University in the Sensor Based Planning Lab
with Professor Howie Choset. He was granted the Ph.D. from the School of Computer
Science, McGill University in 2002 under the supervision of Professors Gregory Dudek and
Evangelos Milios. Thesis title: "Cooperative Localization and Multi-Robot Exploration". He
obtained the M.Sc. from McGill University in the field of Computer Vision in 1995 and the
B.Sc. in 1991 from the Department of Informatics, University of Athens, Greece. His research
has focused on mobile robotics and in particular in the area of cooperating intelligent agents
with application to multi-robot cooperative localization, mapping, exploration and coverage.
Dr. Rekleitis' interests extend to computer vision and sensor networks.
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Konstantinos Tsianos
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Biography: Konstantinos Tsianos has a M.Sc. in Computer Science from Rice University and a Diploma in
Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. His
research interests lie in the areas of machine learning, distributed systems, robotics, and
algorithms. More specifically, he has focused on multi-agent coordination, sampling-based
search algorithms, real-time motion planners for autonomous robots with differential
constraints, and most recently on properties of Bezier curves and B-splines. He received the
Best Student Paper award at ROBOCOMM 2007.
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Augustin Chaintreau
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Bio: A. Chaintreau joined the Thomson Paris Research Lab soon after
graduating in 2006 from Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris, working at
INRIA under the supervision of Francois Baccelli. During his PhD he
worked in collaboration with Alcatel Bell, as well as the IBM Watson
T. J. Research Center in New York. He spent the last year visiting
Intel Research Cambridge to work on opportunistic mobile networking
and wireless networks.
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Dmitry Malioutov
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Bio: Dmitry Malioutov obtained his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in
2008. After a postdoc position in the Machine Learning and Perception group in Microsoft
Research, UK, he is now conducting research in algorithmic trading in DRW, Chicago. His
research is focused on statistical signal processing, machine learning and convex optimization,
with special interest in sparse signal representation, graphical models and message passing
algorithms.
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Gene Cooperman
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Bio: Gene Cooperman received his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1978. He spent two years as a
post‐doc, followed by six years at GTE Laboratories. He has been a professor at Northeastern
University since 1986, and a full professor since 1992. His interests lie in high performance
computation and symbolic algebra. The combination of these two subjects has also led to his
joint work with his students on a second theme: disk‐based parallel computation. He leads the
High Performance Computing Laboratory at Northeastern University, where he currently
advises five PhD students. He has over 80 refereed publications.
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Ali Tizghadam
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Bio: Ali Tizghadam is currently a Post Doctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto. He is also
managing the Network Architecture Lab (NAL) in the Communications group. He received his M.A. Sc in
1994 for University of Tehran in Electrical Engineering. After graduation he went to the industry for
about 10 years where he gained experience in telecommunications especially local exchange switches
and access networks. He then came back to the university to pursue his PhD studies in the Electrical and
Computer Engineering department, at the University of Toronto.
His research interests span the areas of Network Control, Virtualization, Green Communications,
Network Resource Management, Optimization Theory, Autonomic Networking, and their applications in
different networking areas.
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Anastasios Giovanidis
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Bio: Anastasios Giovanidis received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the
National Technical University of Athens, Greece in 2005. From Sept. 2005 to Feb. 2010 he has
been with the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute for Telecommunications in Berlin, Germany,
working as a Research Associate, while pursuing his Dr.‐Ing. degree from the Technical
University of Berlin (defence to take place in April 2010). His research interests include
stochastic control, optimization and probability theory applied to telecommunication systems
with emphasis on queuing networks.
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Maciej Ciesielski
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Bio: Maciej Ciesielski is Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
(ECE) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He received M.S. in Electrical
Engineering from Warsaw Technical University, Poland, in 1974 and Ph.D. in Electrical
Engineering from the University of Rochester, N.Y. in 1983. From 1983 to 1986 he
worked at GTE Laboratories on a silicon compilation project. He joined the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst in 1987, where he teaches and conducts research in the area of
electronic design automation (EDA), and specifically in synthesis, optimization and
verification of digital systems. He is recipient of Doctorate Honoris Causa from the
Université de Bretagne Sud, Lorient, France.
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John MacLaren Walsh
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Bio: John MacLaren Walsh was born in Carbondale, IL in 1981. He received the B.S. (magna cum laude), M.S., and Ph.D. from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 2002, 2004, and 2006 respectively. His M.S. and Ph.D. work at Cornell, under the supervision of C. Richard Johnson, Jr. focused on the performance and convergence of
blind adaptive channel shorteners and the optimality of the turbo/belief propagation decoder. In September, 2006 he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA where he is currently an assistant professor. He is a member of HKN and TBP. His current research interests include: (a) delay mitigating codes and rate delay tradeoffs in multipath routed and network coded networks, (b) joint source separation and identification, and (c) the performance and convergence of distributed collaborative estimation in wireless sensor networks via expectation propagation.
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Vijay Subramanian
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Bio: Vijay G. Subramanian received his Ph.D. degree in electrical
engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999.
From 1999 to 2006, he was with the Networks Business, Motorola, Arlington
Heights, IL developing scheduling algorithms for Motorola's product
offerings. Since May 2006 he is a Research Fellow at the Hamilton
Institute, NUIM, Ireland. His research interests include information
theory, communication networks, queueing theory, theoretical immunology
and applied probability.
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