Parham Aarabi

Parham Aarabi (born August 25 1976) is a world renowned Innovator and award winning lecturer.Fact|date=November 2007

He is a professor at University of Toronto and Canada Research Chair. Selected by MIT as one of the World's Top Innovators, and selected by IEEE as one of the most inspiring EE lecturers in the world.

He is currently a tenured Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Toronto. His Ph.D. is in Electrical Engineering and is from Stanford University.

Awards

In the past few years, he has been the recipient of numerous research and teaching awards including:

*2006 - Selected by TVO as one of "Ontario's Best Lecturers" (Top 30 in Ontario)

*2006 - Received the SAC/APUS Undergraduate Teaching Award

*2005 - Selected by MIT's Technology Review as one of the "World's Top Young Innovators" - known as the TR35 (formerly TR100) Award (international research award)

*2005 - Selected by TVO as one of "Ontario's Best Lecturers" (only two engineering Professors were selected among all of the engineering Professors in Ontario)

*2005 - Awarded Tenure and Promoted to Associate Professor (becoming, at 28, one of the youngest tenured Professors in the history of the University of Toronto)

*2005 - Gordon R. Slemon Teaching of Design Award (departmental award)

*2004 - ECE Departmental Teaching Award (departmental award)

*2004 - IEEE Mac Van Valkenburg Early Career Teaching Award (international award given for the first time by the IEEE Education Society)

*2004 - Selected to speak at the Canadian Parliament as a "Leader of Tomorrow"

*2003 - Faculty of Engineering Early Career Teaching Award (engineering faculty award)

*2003 - ECE Professor of the Year Award (departmental award)

*2002 - Canada Research Chair in Multi-Sensor Information Systems (national award)

*2002 - Best Computer Engineering Professor Award (departmental award)

*2002 - Ontario Distinguished Researcher Award (provincial award)

In June 2001 he founded the Artificial Perception Lab where his group is focusing on developing novel multi-sensor algorithms and systems to enable computers to 'understand' the events and objects in their environments. His research has appeared in over 50 peer-reviewed publications and a variety of international media.

Examples of Parham Aarabi's recent innovations include novel acoustic human-computer interaction systems (link to Discovery Channel video, link to Scientific American article, link to Globe and Mail article), phase-based robust speech recognition systems (on which he recently gave talks at Stanford, Berkeley, and the Federal Parliament of Canada) (link to New York Times article, link to Scientific American article), multi-camera three-dimensional visual search (with applications to medical imaging, image searching, as well as security) (link to Discovery Channel video), as well as the development of "speech acceleration" co-processors that enable real-time robust speech recognition in cars, appliances, and computers.