Ali Akansu


Ali Naci Akansu is a Turkish-American electrical engineer and scientist. He is best known for his seminal contributions to the theory and applications of linear subspace methods including sub-band and wavelet transforms, particularly the binomial QMF and the statistically optimized filter bank, which he developed in 1990 and 1991, respectively.

Biography

Akansu received his B.S. degree from the Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, in 1980, his M.S. and PhD degrees from the Polytechnic University, 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 Visiting Professor at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of the New York University, 2009–2010.
In 1990, he showed that the binomial quadrature mirror filter bank is identical to the Daubechies wavelet filter, and interpreted and evaluated its performance from a discrete-time signal processing perspective.
He organized the first wavelets conference in the United States at NJIT in April 1990, and, then in 1992 and 1994. He published the first wavelets-related engineering book in the literature entitled Multiresolution Signal Decomposition: Transforms, Subbands and Wavelets.
He made contributions in the areas of optimal filter banks, nonlinear phase extensions of discrete Walsh-Hadamard transform and discrete Fourier transform, principal component analysis of first-order autoregressive process, sparse approximation, financial signal processing and quantitative finance. His publications include the books in financial signal processing & engineering entitled A Primer for Financial Engineering: Financial Signal Processing and Electronic Trading and Financial Signal Processing and Machine Learning.
He was a founding director of the New Jersey Center for Multimedia Research, 1996–2000, and NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center for Digital Video, 1998–2000. He was the vice president for research and development of the IDT Corporation, 2000–2001, the founding president and CEO of PixWave, Inc. that has built the technology for secure peer-to-peer video distribution over the Internet. He was an academic visitor at David Sarnoff Research Center, at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and at Marconi Electronic Systems.
He is an IEEE Fellow with the citation for contributions to optimal design of transforms and filter banks for communications and multimedia security.
According to the Mathematics Genealogy Project, as of June 2016, Akansu had a total of 22 doctorate students.

Selected works

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