Biography
Mihaela van der Schaar received both the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in 1996 and 2001, respectively. Prior to joining the UCLA Electrical Engineering Department faculty on July 1st, 2005, she was between 1996 and June 2003 a senior researcher at Philips Research in the Netherlands and USA, where she led a team of researchers working on multimedia coding, processing, networking, and streaming algorithms and architectures. From January to September 2003, she was also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University. From July 1st, 2003 until July 1st, 2005, she was an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of California, Davis.

Prof. van der Schaar has published extensively on multimedia communications, networking, architectures, systems, compression and processing, and holds 30 granted US patents and several more pending. Since 1999, she has been an active participant in the ISO Motion Picture Expert Group (MPEG) standard, to which she has made more than 50 contributions and for which she has received three ISO recognition awards. She also chaired the ad-hoc group on MPEG-21 Scalable Video Coding for three years, and co-chaired the MPEG ad-hoc group on Multimedia Test-beds. She was a guest editor of the EURASIP Special Issue on Multimedia over IP and Wireless Networks, and was the general chair of Picture Coding Symposium 2004, the oldest conference on image/video coding. She is a senior member of IEEE, and was also elected as a Member of the Technical Committee on Multimedia Signal Processing, as well as the Technical Committee on Image and Multiple Dimensional Signal Processing of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. She was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and the SPIE Electronic Imaging Journal from 2002-2005. Currently, she is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and System for Video Technology, of the IEEE Signal Processing Letters, and of the newly founded IEEE Signal Processing Society e-Newsletter.

Research Interests
Prof. van der Schaar's research interests are in the area of Signal Processing and Compression, Networking, Information Theory and Systems Architecture. Her current research interest spans the theory and design of novel algorithms, standards and systems for multimedia coding, processing and ubiquitous communication over Internet and wireless networks. In particular, she is interested in investigating cross-layer optimized wireless multimedia transmission systems, coopetition paradigms for efficient wireless multimedia transmission, multimedia over opportunistic spectrum agile wireless networks, robust and adaptive transmission of multimedia over enterprise networks, multimedia coding and communications over peer-to-peer networks, user-aware and content-aware compression and transmission for universal media access, adaptive compression algorithms and systems, wavelet coding algorithms and systems, distributed transmission and compression, secure content delivery, complexity-scalable and reconfigurable architectures.

Awards and Recognitions