Professor Ishfaq Ahmad

Ishfaq Ahmad, Ph.D., FIEEE is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Director of Multimedia Laboratory, and Director of IRIS (Institute for Research in Security), The University of Texas at Arlington.
 
A Fellow of the IEEE (class of 2008, for “contributions to scheduling techniques in parallel and distributed computing systems”), Ishfaq received a BSc degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan, in 1985, and an MS degree in Computer Engineering and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Syracuse University, New York, U.S.A., in 1987 and 1992, respectively.
 
For his secondary school education, he attended Lahore’s Government College, the prestigious school that has been attended by the likes of Nobel Laureate Dr. Abdus Salam and the great Urdu Poet Dr. Muhammad Iqbal.
 
His research interests include high-performance parallel and distributed computing, scheduling and mapping algorithms for scalable architectures, power-aware computing systems, optimization algorithms, multimedia systems, video compression techniques, and homeland security. His research work in these areas is published in close to 200 technical papers in refereed journals and conferences.
 
Ishfaq has received best paper awards at Supercomputing 90 (New York), Supercomputing `91 (Albuquerque), and the 2001 International Conference on Parallel Processing (Spain). He has also received the 2007 Best Paper Award for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology which was awarded at ISCAS May 2007 in New Orleans.
 
He joined the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department of the University of Texas at Arlington in 2002 as full professor. At UTA, he leads the Multimedia Laboratory and IRIS (Institute for Research in Security), an inter-disciplinary university-wide research center. Prior to joining UT Arlington, he was an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at HKUST in Hong Kong.
 
At HKUST, he also directed the Multimedia Technology Research Center, an officially recognized research center that he conceived and built from scratch in collaboration with Professor Ming Liou. The center received funding from various agencies of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region as well as local and international industries. With more than 70 industrial partners and 40 personnel including faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, full-time staff, and graduate students, the center engaged in numerous R&D projects with academia and industry from Hong Kong, China, Europe, and the United States. The center commercialized several of its technologies to its industrial partners worldwide.
 
Ishfaq’s current research is funded by the Department of Justice (DOJ), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and Sun Microsystems. He has served on the program committees of over 70 international conferences (co-chaired four).
 
He served on the editorial board of IEEE Concurrency and currently is an area editor of: Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. He is also one of the founding editors of IEEE Distributed Systems Online. He is guest editor of a Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems — Power-Aware Parallel and Distributed Systems (PAPADS), and of a Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology — Video Surveillance.
 
Ishfaq coauthored the innovative Amazon download Discriminatory Algorithmic Mechanism Design Based WWW Content Replication. He also coauthored Introduction to Partitioning and Scheduling Minitrack, Scheduling Multimedia Documents in a Distributed System, Policies for Caching OLAP Queries in Internet Proxies, A Fast Adaptive Motion Estimation Algorithm, On Using Game Theory for Perceptually Tuned Rate Control Algorithm for Video Coding, and Region-Based Rate Control and Bit Allocation for Wireless Video Transmission. Read the full list of his publications!