Lina Jamil Karam
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Lina J. Karam is a Lebanese-American electrical and computer engineer. She is an IEEE Fellow and the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing.[1] Her areas of work span digital signal processing, image/video processing, coding and transmission, computer vision, machine learning, and perceptual-based visual processing.
Education
Lina J. Karam received a Bachelor of Engineering from the American University of Beirut in 1992, as well as MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1995. Her PhD supervisor is James H. McClellan. As part of her PhD work, she introduced a new function approximation theory that enabled the development of a new efficient algorithm for the design of optimal equiripple digital Finite-Impulse Response (FIR) filters with arbitrary magnitude and phase responses. She also developed theory and algorithms for the efficient design of multi-dimensional complex-valued FIR filters with arbitrary magnitude and phase responses. Her seminal work on digital filtering has been widely adopted by engineers, scientists, and researchers for the development of improved applications and products in various signal processing, telecommunications, electromagnetic, and biomedical applications, including geophysical processing, magnetic resonance imaging, low-delay filtering, channel equalization, and antenna design, among others. Dr. Karam’s digital filter design algorithm has been integrated in the MATLAB Signal Processing Toolbox (as the cfirpm function).
Career
During her PhD, she interned at Schlumberger in Austin, Texas, where she worked on data visualization, and at AT&T Bell Labs (Murray Hill, New Jersey), where she worked on low bit-rate video compression.
After receiving her PhD degree at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1995, she joined Arizona State University where she became a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Program Chair and Director of the Computer Engineering Program, and the Director of the Image, Video, & Usability Laboratory. In 2020, she was appointed as the Dean of the School of Engineering at the Lebanese American University in Lebanon and became the first woman to hold a Dean of Engineering position in the Middle East.
She has been the recipient of various awards, including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the NASA Technical Innovation Award, the Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Best Journal Paper Award, the IEEE Phoenix Section Outstanding Faculty Award, and the IEEE Region 6 Award. She has directed numerous funded projects that led to successful technology transfer with industry partners. She recently initiated an academia-industry Silicon Valley partnership program, and participated as a judge in the Embedded Vision Summit's Vision Tank 2019, a competition event held in Silicon Valley for startup companies. She initiated and helped in establishing the World’s First Visual Innovation Award in 2016 and the World’s First Multimedia Star Innovator Award in 2019.
Dr. Karam has led interdisciplinary university-industry-government initiatives for defining the next-generation of safe and efficient automated mobility at scale and served as the lead guest editor of a special issue on autonomous driving. On October 30, 2018, Dr. Karam was featured on FOX 10 News in a segment on driverless cars and in a news article in the Phoenix Business Review Journal on Waymo’s Self-Driving Truck Testing. She also participated in a podcast and in various panels on self-driving cars and smart cities including panels organized for law professionals, local cities, and public outreach. She founded the Automated Mobility Alliance in 2019.
Dr. Karam has over 220 technical publications and is an inventor on 7 issued US patents. She is a member of the National Academy of Inventors, ASU Chapter. She served on the IEEE Publication Services and Products Board (PSPB) Strategic Planning Committee, the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s (SPS) Board of Governors, the IEEE Circuits and Systems’ Fellow Evaluation Committee, the IEEE SPS Conference Board, Publications Board, and Award Board, as well as on technical committees and on editorial boards of several high-impact journals. She served as General Co-Chair of IEEE ICME 2019, General Chair for IEEE ICIP 2016, Technical Program Chair for IEEE ICIP 2009, and General Chair for the 2011 IEEE DSP/SPE Workshops. She co-founded the international QoMEX conference. She is member of the IEEE SPS Image, Video & Multidimensional Signal Processing Technical Committee, and of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society’s DSP Technical Committee.
References
External links
- Faculty profile at Arizona State University
- Publications from Google Scholar
- FOX 10 News Interview
- Interview with Phoenix Business Journal
- Podcast on Self-Driving Cars
- Vision Tank 2019 YouTube Video
- 2018 Embedded Vision Alliance Summit Invited Talk
- 2018 Plenary Lecture - NCC - IIT Hyderabad
- Visual Innovation Award News Article
- Visual Innovation Award YouTube Video
- Multimedia Star Innovator Award Board
- Karam-McClellan Complex FIR Design in Matlab Signal Processing Toolbox
- Profile on LinkedIn