Abdulmotaleb El Saddik is University Research Chair and Professor, SITE, University of Ottawa and recipient of the Professional of the Year Award (2008), the Friedrich Wilhelm-Bessel Research Award from Germany's Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2007) the Premier’s Research Excellence Award (PREA 2004), and the National Capital Institute of Telecommunications (NCIT) New Professorship Incentive Award (2004). He is the director of the Multimedia Communications Research Laboratory (MCRLab). He was a Theme co-Leader in the LORNET NSERC Research Network and Director of the Information Technology Cluster, Ontario Research Network on Electronic Commerce (http://www.ornec-ict.uottawa.ca/). He is Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (ACM TOMCCAP), IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM) and 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 25 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 two books and more than 250 publications. He has received research grants and contracts totaling more than $14 million and has supervised more than 90 researchers. His research has been selected for the BEST Paper Award three times. Dr. El Saddik is a Senior Member of ACM, an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, Fellow of tghe Engineering Institute of Canada, and Fellow of IEEE.
