Emil M. Petriu, P.Eng., Life Fellow IEEE, Fellow CAE, Fellow EIC is a Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. 

He received his Dipl. Eng. and Dr. Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Timisoara, Romania, and held a UNESCO postdoctoral scholarship in the Department of Applied Physics at the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands.  He is a Registered Professional Engineer (P.Eng,) in the Province of Ontario, Canada. 

Before immigrating to Canada in 1985, he was a faculty member in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute, Timisoara, Romania, co-operant faculty member at the University of Oran, Algeria, and research engineer in the Department of Applied Physics at the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands.

Since 1985, Dr. Petriu has been a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and then the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa, where he held a University Research Chair in Ubiquitous Computing Technologies for e-Society (2004-2019).  He served as Department Chair for one term, 1995-1998, and as Director of the School for two terms, 1998-2001 and 2009-2012.

Dr. Petriu held visiting positions including guest researcher at NRC Ottawa (1990), guest researcher at the Canadian Space Agency, Ottawa (1991-1993), visiting professor at the Research Institute of Electronics, Shizuoka University, Hamamatsu, Japan (1994), visiting researcher at the Communications Research Centre, Ottawa (2002), visiting professor at Graz University of Technology, Austria (2003), visiting researcher at Larus Technologies in Ottawa (2011, 2014 and 2017), and received an Honorary Professorship from Óbuda University, Budapest, Hungary (2011).

He served as Chief Scientific Officer of XYZ RGB Inc., Ottawa (2005-2010).

Since joining the University of Ottawa in 1985, Dr. Petriu has supervised 94 graduate theses (27 PhD, 67 Master’s), 12 post-doctoral fellows and 23 research personnel.

One of his significant early research contributions was the development of innovative 1D and 2D absolute-position encoding techniques using pseudo-random sequences and arrays that have the distinct advantage of requiring only one code symbol per quantization step. His pioneering work on pseudo-random encoding is cited as a basic reference in this area.

Under a series of research grants from NSERC, CITO, and MMO he developed bio-inspired random-pulse neural network hardware architectures for real-time pattern recognition, modelling multi-modal object properties, and robot control.

Working on research projects funded by the NSERC, Canadian Space Agency, ORF, OCE, MMO, CITO, NCIT, MITACS, IBM, INCO, Senstar Co., and Larus Technologies he has developed new tactile sensors and haptic human-computer interfaces, computer vision, signal processing, sensor fusion, and artificial intelligence control systems for space robotics, healthcare, security, and industrial applications.

During his career Dr. Petriu has published 184 refereed journal papers, 33 book chapters, 418 papers in refereed conference proceedings, authored two books, edited four books, and received two patents.

Dr. Petriu has been actively involved in the organization of many international conferences, symposia and workshops. He was also an invited speaker at various international conferences, such as CIVEMSA 2018 – IEEE Int. Conf. on Computational Intelligence and Virtual Environments for Measurement Systems and Applications, (Keynote Speaker), Ottawa, ON, Canada, May 2018,  ISTAS’13 - IEEE Int. Symposium on Technology and Society, (Invited Speaker), Toronto, ON, Canada, June 2013, and SMC 2009 - IEEE Int. Conf. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, (Honorary Keynote Speaker), San Antonio, TX, USA, Oct. 2009.

Dr. Petriu served as a member of the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (1999-2002), the Mentors Group of the Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems Laboratory, University of Örebro, Sweden, (1998-2008), and the Jury for the Robotdalen Scientific Award, Sweden (2007-2010).

He served as a member of the Administrative Committee (1996-2005) and Vice-President (2000-2002) of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society, Chair of the IEEE Joseph F. Keithley Award Committee (2007-2010), and Member of the IEEE Technical Field Awards Council (2007-2010). He served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement (1998-2010), and as founding Co-Chair of three Technical Committees of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society:  TC-15 Virtual Systems in Measurements (1996-2019), TC-28 Instrumentation and Measurement for Robotics and Automation (2007-2011), and TC-30 Security and Contraband Detection (2002-2014). He also served as Co-Chair of the TC on Intelligent Instrumentation and Measurement of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (2002-2005), and Chair of the Virtual Reality Task Force of the Intelligent Systems Applications TC of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (2006-2014). He is serving as a member of the Steering Committee of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (T-CIAIG).

In recognition of his contributions to the engineering profession, in 2001 he was elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (FIEEE) "for contributions to the development of pseudorandom encoding techniques for absolute position measurement."  In 2001, he was inducted as Fellow in the Canadian Academy of Engineering (FCAE), and in 2000 he was elected Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada (FEIC).

Dr. Petriu received the NSERC Synergy Award for Innovation (2015) in recognition of the effective industry-academia partnership in the development of “Multi-sensor monitoring systems for mission critical and territorial security applications” in collaboration with Larus Technologies.

He received the IEEE Ottawa Section’s 2017 Outstanding Educator Award, “for outstanding contributions to engineering education, research, entrepreneurship and commercialization of industrial applications.”  He was a co-recipient of the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education 1998 Prix d'Excellence – Bronze, for the Best Private Sector Partnership.

He was a co-recipient of the Romanian Academy - 2016 Grigore Moisil Award for contributions to fuzzy systems optimization, and of the 2003 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award.

Dr. Petriu received the 2009 IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society Distinguished Service Award "for outstanding leadership during more than ten years of AdCom membership, including service as General Chair or Program Chair of five IMTC conferences, and as Co-chair of TC-15, TC-28, and TC-30," and the 2003 IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society Technical Award "for contributions to imaging processing systems, robotics, virtual reality and applications of artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic and neural networks." 

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Updated: September 2021