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, Ontario, Canada. Since 1985, Dr. Petriu has been a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and then SITE, University of Ottawa. In 2004 he received a University Research Chair at the University of Ottawa, in Ubiquitous Computing Technologies for e-Society.
On 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), and visiting professor at the Institute of Electrical Measurement and Measurement Signal Processing, Graz University of Technology, Austria (2003).
         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. 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. 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.
         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.