Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, a University Research Chair and Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa, is an internationally-recognized scholar who has made strong contributions to the knowledge and understanding of multimedia computing, communications and applications, particularly in the digitization, communication and security of the sense of touch, or haptics, which is a new medium that is significantly changing the way in which human-to-human and human-computer interactions are performed.
Prof. El Saddik is the director of the Multimedia Communications Research Laboratory (MCRLab) and the Distributed & Collaborative Virtual Environments Research Laboratory (DISCOVER). He is Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (ACM TOMCCAP), IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (IEEE TCIAIG) and Guest Editor for several IEEE Transactions and Journals. Dr. El Saddik has been serving on several technical program committees of numerous IEEE and ACM events. He has been the General Chair and/or Technical Program Chair of more than 30 international conferences symposia and workshops on collaborative hapto-audio-visual environments, multimedia communications and instrumentation and measurement. He was the general co-chair of ACM MM 2008. He is leading researcher in haptics, service-oriented architectures, collaborative environments and ambient interactive media and communications. He has authored and co-authored three books and more than 350 publications. He has received research grants and contracts totaling more than $17 million and has supervised more than 100 researchers.
Prof. El Saddik has attained one of the highest degrees of recognition when he was elected in 2009 a Fellow of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering), for his contributions to interactive haptic audio visual systems. It is well known that fewer than one-tenth of one percent of the IEEE members (roughly 380,000) are granted this prestigious title. He was also elected Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (2010) and Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada (2010). He is the first Canadian in Computer Science & Engineering to receive the very prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award from the German Humboldt Foundation in 2007. He is the recipient of the Ontario Premier's Research Excellence Award (PREA), in 2004 and the National Capital Institute of Telecommunications (NCIT) New Professorship Incentive Award (2004). In 2008 he was appointed an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, he also received the Professional of the Year Award, from the Canadian Lebanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry for Achievement in the Development of Canada. He has also received five Outstanding/Best Paper Awards. Most recently Dr. El Saddik has been the recipient of the 2010 Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Scientist Award, the 2011 Cátedra de Excelencia from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain and the 2010 IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society Technical Award, which is the highest award of IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement society, for his outstanding contributions to multimedia computing. He is also the recipient of the 2012 George S. Glinski Award for Excellence in Research.