Professor Eliathamby Ambikairajah

BSc (Eng), PhD, FIET, CEng, FIEAust, CPEng, SMIEEE

Former Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Innovation & Enterprise) (2020-2021)
Former Head of School of Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications (2009 - 2019)

Professor Eliathamby Ambikairajah received his BSc (Eng) (Hons) degree from the University of Sri Lanka and received his PhD degree in Signal Processing from Keele University in the UK. He was appointed as Head of Electronic Engineering and later Dean of Engineering at the Athlone Institute of Technology in the Republic of Ireland from 1982 to 1999. His key publications led to his repeated appointment as a short-term Invited Research Fellow with the British Telecom Laboratories in the UK, for ten years from 1989 to 1999.

Professor Ambikairajah joined the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia in 1999 and served as the Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor Innovation and Enterprise during 2020, after previously serving as the Head of School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications from 2009 to 2019.

His research interests include speaker and language recognition, emotion detection, cochlear modelling and biomedical signal processing. He has authored and co-authored approximately 350 journal and conference papers and is the recipient of many competitive research grants. He was a Faculty Associate with the Institute of Infocomm Research (A*STAR), Singapore from 2010 to 2018, and was an Advisory Board member of the AI Speech Lab at AI Singapore (2019-2021). Professor Ambikairajah was an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Education from 2012 to 2019.

He received the UNSW Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence in 2004 for his innovative use of educational technology and innovation in electrical engineering teaching programs, and in 2014 he received the UNSW Excellence in Senior Leadership Award. In 2019, he won the UNSW President's People’s Choice Award, which recognises a single staff member who goes above and beyond in all five ‘Values in Action’, at the University. The Award was based on the highest number of votes from across the University.

Professor Ambikairajah was an APSIPA Distinguished Lecturer for the 2013-14 term. He was the Inaugural Chair for the SPS Entrepreneurship Forum at ICASSP'22 and led the creation of the first-ever SPS Entrepreneurship Forum. Professor Ambikairajah is a Fellow and a Chartered Engineer of Engineers Australia (EA) and the IET UK and is a Life Senior Member of the IEEE and a Life Member of APSIPA.

Speech Processing and Auditory Modelling Research Laboratory:  http://cochlear-signal-processing-lab.ee.unsw.edu.au/