Ali N. Akansu, professor of electrical and computer engineering, has always blended his theoretical research work with applications of industry and has been with New Jersey Institute of Technology since 1987. He was a founding director of the New Jersey Center for Multimedia Research (NJCMR) NJIT- Princeton Partnership (first in NJIT history) from 1996-2000 and NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center for Digital Video (NJIT, RPI and Princeton partnership) between 1998-2000.  He also spearheaded the National Security Agency (NSA) designation of NJIT as a Center for Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education in 2003.

Akansu was the vice president of research and development of IDT Corporation in 2000-2001. He also was the founding president and chief executive officer of PixWave, where he led the development of the first software product in the market to secure peer-to-peer (P2P) video distribution system over the Internet including a real-time video watermarking and fingerprinting system for content authentication and tracing. Prior to that, Dr. Akansu was an academic visitor at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and at EC-Marconi Electronic Systems Corp. during the summers of 1989 and 1996, and 1992, respectively.  Dr. Akansu was an important contributor to the IBM proposal for MPEG1 standard in the late 1980s. He regularly consults to the industry and sits on the boards of directors of start-up companies in communications and e-commerce.

Akansu’s research interests include signal theory, linear transforms and algorithms, signal processing for digital communications, Internet multimedia including security as aspects, and genes and signals. He has published more than 200 refereed conference and journal articles and four books, gave numerous invited talks internationally, guided more than 15 PhD dissertations on transforms and their applications in image/video coding, digital communications, Internet multimedia and information security. Dr. Akansu administered and managed more than $10 million worth of research and development programs and projects in academia and the private sector funded by the state and federal government agencies, and industry.

He has served as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. He was a member of the Signal Processing Theory & Methods, and Multimedia Signal Processing technical committees of the IEEE SIgnal Processing Society between 1992-2000.

He organized the first Wavelets-related technical meeting in the United States in 1990 at NJIT. He was the technical program chairman of IEEE Digital Signal Processing Workshop 1996, Loen, Norway, Steering Committee Member and Publications Chair of IEEE ICASSP 2000, Istanbul, Turkey. He was the lead guest editor of two special issues of IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing on Theory and Application of Filter Banks and Wavelet Transforms (April 1998), and on Data Hiding Theory and Applications (April 2003).  He is the award chair of IEEE New Jersey Coast Section.

Akansu received a BS from the Technical University of Istanbul in 1980 and the MS and PhD degrees from Polytechnic University (Brooklyn), in 1983 and 1987, respectively, all in electrical engineering.