Director

Professor En-Hui Yang, Canada Research Chair in information theory and its applications.
research group

Dr. En-hui Yang, University Professor

Dr. En-hui Yang has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo since June 1997, where he is now University Professor. He is the founding director of the Leitch–University of Waterloo Multimedia Communications Lab, co-founder of SlipStream Data Inc. (now a subsidiary of BlackBerry), and founder of BicDroid Inc.

His research interests range from multimedia compression, information theory, digital communications, source and channel coding, image and video coding, deep learning and artificial intelligence, to information security. With over 250 papers and more than 250 patents/patent applications worldwide, his research has benefited people in over 170 countries through commercialized products, video coding open sources, and video coding standards.

Dr. Yang's soft-decision quantization algorithms are widely deployed across computing and communications devices, reaching billions of people worldwide. His data self-protection technologies now secure hundreds of millions of smartphones and enterprise servers. He was the General Co-chair of the 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory — the largest premier international conference on information theory in the world.


Selected Awards & Honours

2024   University Professor, University of Waterloo

2023   Canadian Award for Telecommunications Research

2021   IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award

2014   IEEE Information Theory Society Padovani Lecture

2009   Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (elected)

2009   Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (elected)

2008   Fellow of IEEE (elected)

2007   Inaugural Ontario Premier's Catalyst Award — Innovator of the Year

2007   Ernest C. Manning Award of Distinction