Founding the Leitch-University Multimedia Communications Laboratory at the University of Waterloo
In 1998, Professor Yang founded the Leitch-University Multimedia Communications Laboratory at the University of Waterloo. This lab, being one of the largest, leading laboratories of its kind in multimedia communications in Canada, is sponsored by the business partner of this project, Leitch Technology Corporation. Research in the lab has been focused on information theory, multimedia data compression, source and channel coding, digital communications, digital watermarking and information hiding, quantum information theory, and efficient and robust data transmission protocols. Numerous papers authored by the members of the lab have been published in leading international academic journals, symposiums, and conferences. Many research results obtained in the lab have been transferred into communication products and are currently being used in industry. The research in the lab has been funded by CITO, NSERC, CFI, CRC, PREA, Leitch Technology Corporation, Bell Canada, SlipStream Data Inc., Hughes Network Systems, and other industrial companies. The lab is equipped with the state of the art imaging and audiovisual devices including a non-linear video processing system donated by Leitch Technology Corporation, a high-end backbone computing infrastructure including a Sun Fire V880 server for developing multimedia processing algorithms, and test-beds for testing algorithms and interfaces in wired and wireless environments.
Meet the Founding Director
Professor En-Hui Yang is an internationally renowned scientist in the areas of information theory, digital communications, multimedia data compression, and digital watermarking. Through years of research in these areas, Professor Yang has published over 100 papers on IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, and other leading academic journals, symposiums and conferences. He has developed 7 codec software packages which are being used in information technology industries, delivered 37 invited lectures and seminars worldwide and held/filed 5 patents. His contributions in these areas have been well-recognized by the academic society as well as by the information technology industry. For example, one of his recent research results, the grammar-based coding theory, stands for the state of the art in data compression theory, and lays a new, advanced framework for many other researchers to develop new efficient data compression algorithms. The Yang-Kieffer data compression algorithm, developed by En-Hui Yang and his co-worker Dr. Kieffer within the framework of grammar-based coding, has been used in Hughes Network Systems and SlipStream Data Inc.
Yang is a Canada Research Chair in information theory and multimedia compression and a cofounder of SlipStream Data Inc. He received 2000 Ontario Premier's Research Excellence Award and 2002 Ontario distinguished Researcher Award in recognition of research contributions to information theory, grammar-based coding, and multimedia data compression. In 2021 Yang was made recipient of the prestigious 2021 IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award for his outstanding contributions to the theory and practice of source coding, in 2023, he was made recipient of the Canadian Award for Telecommunications Research - an elite biennial award presented by the Canadian Society of Information Technology, and in 2024, he was designated "University Professor" by the University of Waterloo's Tenure & Promotion Committee.