Avideh Zakhor

Avideh Zakhor joined the faculty at UC Berkeley in 1988 where she currently holds the Qualcomm Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Her areas of interest include theories and applications of signal, image and video processing, 3D computer vision, and multimedia networking. She has won a number of best paper awards, including the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 1997 and 2009, IEEE Circuits and Systems Society in 1997 and 1999, IEEE Solid Circuits Society in 2008, IEEE international conference on image processing in 1999, Packet Video Workshop in 2002, and IEEE Workshop on Multimodal Sentient Computing in 2007. She holds 6 U.S. patents, and is the co-author of three books with her students.

Prof. Zakhor received the B. S. degree from California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and the S. M. and Ph. D. degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, all in electrical engineering, in 1983, 1985, and 1987 respectively. She was a General Motors scholar from 1982 to 1983, was a Hertz fellow from 1984 to 1988, received the Presidential Young Investigators (PYI) award, and Office of Naval Research (ONR) young investigator award in 1992. In 2001, she was elected as IEEE fellow and received the Okawa Prize in 2004.

She co-founded OPC technology in 1996, which was later by Mentor Graphics (Nasdaq: MENT) in 1998, and UrbanScan Inc. in 2005 which was acquired by Google in 2007. The technology behind 3D Google Earth was originally developed in her lab at U.C. Berkeley.