Ali Akansu

Ali N. Akansu received the B.S. degree from the Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, in 1980, the M.S. and Ph.D degrees from the Polytechnic University (NYU now), Brooklyn, New York, in 1983 and 1987, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. Since 1987, he has been with the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was a Founding Director of the New Jersey Center for Multimedia Research (NJCMR) between 1996-2000, and NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) for Digital Video between 1998-2000. Dr. Akansu spearheaded the National Security Agency (NSA) Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education at NJIT, 2003-2005. He was the Area Coordinator of the Communications, Signal Processing and Microwaves Area of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (2008-2011). He served on the Governing Board of the Professional Staff Association at NJIT (2006-2008), on NJIT Faculty Council (Senate) (2007-2011) including as its elected Chair (2010-2011).

Dr. Akansu was the Vice President for Research and Development of IDT Corporation [NYSE:IDT], the founding President and CEO of PixWave, Inc., and Senior VP for Technology Development of TV.TV (IDT Entertainment subsidiaries), 2000-2001. He has sat on the boards of a few companies and an investment fund. He was an academic visitor at David Sarnoff Research Center, at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and at GEC-Marconi Electronic Systems Corp. during the summers of 1988, 1989 and 1996, and 1992, respectively. Dr. Akansu was a Visiting Professor at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University performed research on Quantitative Finance, 2009-2010. His current research and professional interests include theory of signals and transforms, financial engineering & algorithmic trading, explainable machine learning, and high performance DSP (FPGA & GPU computing).

Dr. Akansu is a Fellow of the IEEE. He has served as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, as a member of the Digital Signal Processing (DSP), Signal Processing Theory & Methods, and Multimedia Signal Processing technical committees of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He organized the first Wavelets Conference in the United States in April 1990. He was the technical program chairman of IEEE Digital Signal Processing Workshop 1996, Loen, Norway. He served as a member of the Steering Committee and the Publications Chair of IEEE ICASSP 2000, Istanbul, Turkey. He was the Lead Guest Editor of the two special issues of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing on Theory and Application of Filter Banks and Wavelet Transforms (April 1998), and on Signal Processing for Data Hiding in Digital Media and Secure Content Delivery (April 2003). He was also the Lead Guest Editor of the two special issues of IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing on Signal Processing Methods in Finance and Electronic Trading (August 2012), and on Financial Signal Processing and Machine Learning for Electronic Trading (September 2016).

http://web.njit.edu/~akansu