Michael Elad holds a B.Sc., M.Sc. and D.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. His M.Sc. under the guidance of Prof. David Malah focused on video compression algorithms, and his D.Sc. centered around super-resolution algorithms for image sequences, guided by Prof. Arie Feuer. After several years in industrial research in Hewlett-Packard Lab Israel and in Jigami, Michael took a research associate position at Stanford University during the years 2001-2003, working closely with Prof. Gene Golub, Prof. Peyman Milanfar, and Prof. David L. Donoho. Since 2003 Michael Elad holds a tenure-track faculty position in the Computer Science department at the Technion. He was tenured and promoted to Associate Professorship in 2007, and promoted to full-professorship in 2010.
Research
Michael Elad works in the fields of signal processing and image processing, specializing in particular on inverse problems and sparse representations. The field of sparse representations introduces a universal dimensionality reduction model for data sources and signals based on "sparsity", along with various theoretical and practical tools for implementing it. In recent years this field has been shown to be intimately connected to deep-learning architectures and algorithms. Prof. Elad has authored , many of which have led to . Among these, he is the creator of the K-SVD algorithm, together with Aharon and Bruckstein, and he is also the author of the 2010 book "Sparse and Redundant Representations: From Theory to Applications in Signal and Image Processing". In 2017, Prof. Elad and Yaniv Romano created a specialized MOOC on , given under edX.
Professional Roles and Honors
Prof. Elad has served on several journals' editorial boards over the years:
Since January 2016, he is serving as the Editor-in-Chief for , the prime venue for journal publications in the field of image processing.
During the years 2015-2018 Prof. Elad headed the . This is a flagship undergraduate program at the Technion, meant for exceptional students, with emphasis on tailored and challenging study tracks for each of the ~50 students enrolled, along with an exposure to research. Michael is the recipient of the 2008 and 2015 Henri Taub Prize for academic excellence, the 2010 Hershel-Rich prize for innovation, and the 2017 Yanai prize for excellence in teaching. His 2009 SIAM Review paper with Donoho and Bruckstein received the SIAG Imaging-Science Prize in 2014. Michael is an IEEE Fellow since 2012 and he was named a SIAM Fellow in 2018.. He was awarded the prestigious ERC advanced grant during the years 2013-2018. Prof. Elad is the recipient of three IEEE awards in 2018: The IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award for contributions to sparsity-based signal processing; The IEEE SPS Sustained Impact Paper Award for his K-SVD paper mentioned above; and The SPS best paper award for his paper on the Analysis K-SVD. Prof. Elad appeared in the for the years 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018, published by . These lists include the ~3500 world’s most influential minds in science, covering various disciplines, from Immunology and Agriculture, through Chemistry and Physics, all the way to Computer Sciences and Engineering.
