Welcome to my academic website! My personal website can be found here: www.ethervizion.com.

I am a Ph.D. student in the Communications Group, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. I am under the supervision of K.N. (Kostas) Plataniotis.

My research is in the areas of image and video coding, multimedia security and privacy, and biometrics. One of my current areas of focus is on Privacy Protected Surveillance. This work has been cited and recommended for evaluation by the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner in her report on the Toronto Transit Comission (TTC) video surveillance system. I was also profiled in the Toronto Star in relation to this work. More details pertaining to my research can be found on my research page. A list of publications can be found here.

I will be the course instructor for ECE462 - Multimedia Systems in the Spring of 2009.

I received the Bachelor of Applied Science degree in 2001 in the Engineering Science program (electrical option) at the University of Toronto and the Master of Applied Science degree in 2003 in the Communications Group (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering) also at the University of Toronto. The title of the M.A.Sc. thesis was "Embedded Wavelet-Based Coding of the Shape and Texture of Arbitrarily-Shaped Visual Objects."

I am a member of IEEE as well as the vice-chair of the Signals Processing Chapter under IEEE Toronto Section.

One of my hobbies is photography. You can see some of my photos on my flickr page and more at my personal website.