An entrepreneur with strong ties to Waterloo Engineering claimed a $25,000 award handed out this week by a provincial organization dedicated to commercializing innovation.
Abdul Rehman, who is CEO of SSIMWAVE Inc. and earned a PhD in electrical engineering at Waterloo, won the Martin Walmsley Award for Entrepreneurship at the annual meeting of the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) in Toronto.
Rehman co-founded SSIMWAVE with Zhou Wang, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Waterloo, and Kai Zeng, a post-doctoral fellow who also earned his PhD at Waterloo.
The company’s products help customers in the media and entertainment industries measure, manage and optimize video quality. Wang won a television Emmy Award in 2015 as co-inventor of the algorithm at the core of its technology.
Funded by the Ontario government, the OCE partners with industry to invest in the commercialization of innovations developed at the province’s universities, colleges and research hospitals.