Ali Akansu
Encyclopedia
Ali N. Akansu is a Turkish American
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
scientist best known for his contributions to the theory and applications of sub-band
Sub-band coding
Sub-band coding is any form of transform coding that breaks a signal into a number of different frequency bands and encodes each one independently. This decomposition is often the first step in data compression for audio and video signals....
and wavelet transforms.
Biography
Akansu received his B.S. degree from the Istanbul Technical UniversityIstanbul Technical University
Istanbul Technical University is an international technical university located in Istanbul, Turkey. It is the world's third oldest technical university dedicated to engineering sciences as well as social sciences recently, and is one of the most prominent educational institutions in Turkey...
, Turkey, in 1980, his M.S. and PhD degrees from the Polytechnic University
Polytechnic University of New York
The Polytechnic Institute of New York University, often referred to as Polytechnic Institute of NYU, NYU Polytechnic, or NYU-Poly, is the engineering and applied sciences affiliate of New York University...
, Brooklyn, New York, in 1983 and 1987, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. Since 1987, he has been with the New Jersey Institute of Technology
New Jersey Institute of Technology
New Jersey Institute of Technology is a public research university in Newark, New Jersey. It is often also referred to as Newark College of Engineering ....
where he is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
He showed and presented academic talks in 1989 that the binomial quadrature mirror filter bank (binomial QMF) is identical to the Daubechies wavelet
Daubechies wavelet
Named after Ingrid Daubechies, the Daubechies wavelets are a family of orthogonal wavelets defining a discrete wavelet transform and characterized by a maximal number of vanishing moments for some given support...
filter, interpreted and evaluated its performance from a discrete-time signal processing perspective published in April 1990. He organized the first wavelets conference in the United States at NJIT in April 1990, and in 1992, he co-authored the first wavelet-related engineering book published in the literature entitled Multiresolution Signal Decomposition: Transforms, Subbands and Wavelets. His more recent research activities include nonlinear phase extensions of complex transforms like Fourier techniques and their applications, and quantitative finance problems.
He was a founding director of the New Jersey Center for Multimedia Research (NJCMR), 1996–2000, and NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) for Digital Video between 1998–2000. He was the vice president for research and development of the IDT Corporation 2000–2001. He was the founding president and CEO of PixWave, Inc. (an IDT subsidiary), that has built the technology for secure peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
video distribution over the Internet. He sits on the boards of directors of a few companies and an investment fund on CleanTech. He was an academic visitor at David Sarnoff Research Center (Sarnoff Corporation
Sarnoff Corporation
Sarnoff Corporation, with headquarters in West Windsor Township, New Jersey, was a research and development company specializing in vision, video and semiconductor technology....
), at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center
Thomas J. Watson Research Center
The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for the IBM Research Division.The center is on three sites, with the main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, 38 miles north of New York City, a building in Hawthorne, New York, and offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts.- Overview :The...
, and at Marconi Electronic Systems
Marconi Electronic Systems
Marconi Electronic Systems , or GEC-Marconi as it was until 1998, was the defence arm of The General Electric Company . It was demerged from GEC and acquired by British Aerospace on November 30, 1999 to form BAE Systems...
. Most recently, he was a Visiting Professor at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences is an independent division of New York University under the Faculty of Arts & Science that serves as a center for research and advanced training in computer science and mathematics...
of the New York University (2009–2010).
He is an IEEE Fellow
IEEE Fellow
An IEEE member is elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow for "unusual distinction in the profession and shall be conferred by the Board of Directors upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest"...
(since 2008) with the citation for contributions to optimal design of transforms and filter banks for communications and multimedia security.
According to the Mathematics Genealogy Project
Mathematics Genealogy Project
The Mathematics Genealogy Project is a web-based database for the academic genealogy of mathematicians. As of September, 2010, it contained information on approximately 145,000 mathematical scientists who contribute to "research-level mathematics"...
, as of September 2010, Akansu had a total of 18 doctorate students.