The University of British Columbia

Professor

Rabab Ward

Rabab K. Ward is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UBC. She is presently appointed in the Office of the Vice-President Research Office as the natural sciences and engineering research coordinator for UBC. She ensures that initiatives are developed to support research and scholarship in engineering and the natural sciences and that the relevant information is disseminated .

Dr. Ward is Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Canadian Academy of Engineers and the Engineering Institute of Canada. She has received British Columbia's top engineering award "The RA McLachlan Memorial Award", the IEEE Signal Processing Society top award "The Society Award", the UBC Killam Research Prize, the YWCA Woman of Distinction Award and UBC Engineering Co-op Faculty Member of the Year Award (2010).

Dr. Ward's research interests are mainly in the areas of signal, image and video processing. She has made contributions in the areas of signal detection, image encoding, compression, recognition, restoration and enhancement, and their applications to cable TV, HDTV, medical images, infant cry signals and brain computer interfaces . She has published over 120 refereed journal papers, 250 refereed conference articles and holds six patents related to cable television picture monitoring, measurement and noise reduction. Applications of her work have been transferred to U.S. and Canadian industries. She is the inventor of the non-intrusive measurement methods for cable TV video impairments (licensed to Hewlett-Packard) and co-inventor of a non-interfering video system for measuring size and biomass of fish in cages and Tanks (licensed to J.B Thompson and Associates).

Dr. Ward was the Vice President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2003 - 2005) and is presently serving on this Society's Board of Governors. She was the General Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing 2000, the Vice Chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits & Systems 2004, chair of the IEEE Symposium on Signal Processing and Information Technology , and is the chair of IEEE MMSP 2012 and the co-chair of ICASSP 2013. She was the Principal Investigator of the $22.2 million CFI/BCKDF award which resulted in a new building at UBC that houses the most modern equipment in all areas related to human centered technologies .

Research Areas

• Biomedical Technologies
• Communication Systems

Research Groups

• Biomedical and Multimedia Signal Processing
• Image & Signal Processing Laboratory

Latest Publications