Petriu, Emil M.
School of EECS's Director and Professor
Dr. Eng. in Electrical Engineering / Docteur en génie électrique
Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)Telephone: 613-562-5800 extension: 6208
Web
http://www.eecs.uottawa.ca/~petriu
Research Interests:
Human-Computer Symbiosis
Biology-inspired Robot Sensors and Perception
Multi-Sensor Systems
Interactive Virtual Environments
Neural Networks and Fuzzy Systems
Digital Integrated Circuit Testing
Biography:
Emil M. Petriu, P.Eng. F’IEEE, F’CAE, F’EIC is a Professor and University Research Chair in the School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE), University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
He received his Dr. Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Timisoara, Romania, in 1978. In 1979, he held a UNESCO postdoctoral scholarship in the Department of Applied Physics at the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands. He is a Registered Professional Engineer in the Province of Ontario, Canada.
Before immigrating to Canada in 1985, he was a faculty member in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute, Timisoara, Romania, “cooperant” faculty member at the University of Oran, Algeria, and research engineer in the Department of Applied Physics at the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands.
Since 1985, Dr. Petriu has been a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and then SITE, University of Ottawa, and has served as Chairman of the former from 1995 to 1997 and as Director of SITE from 1998 to 2001. In recognition of his contributions to the establishment of SITE, he became one of the four co-recipients of the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education 1998 Prix d’Excellence – Bronze, for the Best Private Sector Partnership. In 2004 Dr. Petriu received a University Research Chair at the University of Ottawa, in Ubiquitous Computing Technologies for e-Society.
On half year sabbatical leaves, he was visiting researcher at the Canadian Space Agency (1992), visiting professor at the Research Institute of Electronics, Shizuoka University, Hamamatsu, Japan (1994), visiting researcher at the Communications Research Centre, Ottawa (2002), visiting professor at the Institute of Electrical Measurement and Measurement Signal Processing, Graz University of Technology, Austria (2003), and visiting researcher at the Larus Technologies, Ottawa (2006),
He has published 92 refereed journal papers, 10 book chapters, 227 papers in refereed conference proceedings, authored two books, edited two books, and received two patents. One of his most significant contributions, made in the mid 80s, was the development of an innovative absolute-position measurement technique using “pseudo-random binary sequences” that has the distinct advantage of requiring only one bit of code per quantization step. His pioneering work on pseudo-random encoding is cited as a basic reference in this area.
Under a series of research grants and contracts from CITO, MMO, and NSERC, he developed random-pulse neural network hardware architectures for real-time modelling of multi-modal object properties. Working on research projects funded by the NSERC, ORF, Canadian Space Agency, MMO, CITO, NCIT, Senstar Co., and Larus Technologies he has developed new tactile sensors and haptic human-computer interfaces, computer vision methods, and multi-sensor data fusion techniques for healthcare, security, industrial and space robotics applications. Under funding from CITO, INCO and NSERC, he has been working since 1998 on the development of a new generation of intelligent autonomous robotic sensor agents able to operate in hazardous or remote environments such as mines, nuclear and chemical plants, and underwater.
Dr. Petriu is co-director of the DISCOVER Lab at the University of Ottawa. He has supervised 72 graduate students (25 PhD, 47 Master’s), 5 post-doctoral fellows and 18 research engineers.
Dr. Petriu served as a member of the Administrative Committee (1996-2005) and Vice-President (2000-2002) of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society. He served as Chair of the IEEE Joseph F. Keithley Award Committee (2007-2010) and member of the IEEE Technical Field Awards Council (2007-2010). He is serving as Chair of the TC-15 on Virtual Systems In Measurements, Co-Chair of the TC-30 Security and Contraband Detection of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society, and Chair of the Virtual Reality Task Force of the Intelligent Systems Applications Technical Committee of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.
He has been actively involved in the organization of many international conferences, symposia and workshops. He was General Chair of the IMTC/2005 - IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference, May 2005, in Ottawa, ON, Canada and VECIMS 2010 - IEEE International Conference on Virtual Environments, Human-Computer Interfaces and Measurement Systems, September 2010, in Taranto, Italy, and Honorary Chair of VECIMS 2009, May 2009, in Hong Kong, China. He served as Program Chair of the IMTC/97 - IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference, May 1997, in Ottawa, ON, Canada, IMTC/98 in St. Paul, MN, USA, IMTC/2002 in Anchorage, Alaska, USA, IMS 2005 - IEEE International Workshop on Measurement Systems for Homeland Security, Contraband Detection and Personal Safety, March 2005, in Orlando, FL, USA, IMS 2006 in Alexandria, VA, USA, VECIMS 2007 - IEEE International Conference on Virtual Environments, Human-Computer Interfaces and Measurement Systems, June 2007, in Ostuni, Italy, I2MTC/2008 - IEEE International Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference, May 2008, in Victoria, BC, Canada, and CIVE 2009 - IEEE Workshop on Computational Intelligence in Virtual Environments, March 2009, in Nashville, TN, USA.
In recognition of his contributions to the engineering profession, in 2000, he was elected Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada (FEIC), and in 2001, he was inducted as Fellow in the Canadian Academy of Engineering (FCAE). In 2001 he was elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (FIEEE) “for contributions to the development of pseudorandom encoding techniques for absolute position measurement.” He received the 2003 IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society Technical Award “for contributions to imaging processing systems, robotics, virtual reality and applications of artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic and neural networks” and the 2009 IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society Distinguished Service Award. He was a co-recipient of the 2003 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award, the unique paper award presented by IEEE in that year.