Professor Eliathamby Ambikairajah is currently serving as the Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor Enterprise, after previously serving as the Head of School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia from 2009 to 2019.
He has had a stellar academic career, having authored or co-authored over 300 research papers, won numerous grants and received the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence and the UNSW Senior Leadership Award. As a leader he has firmly established the School as the top Electrical Engineering school in Australia and among the top 50 in the world. He conceived and implemented major changes to degree programs and initiated and led a 5-year refurbishment project which produced world-class, cutting-edge laboratories and teaching facilities. He has successfully driven major international collaborations and in 2019 was the recipient of the People’s Choice Award as part of the UNSW President’s Awards.
Professor Ambikairajah received his BSc(Eng) (Hons) degree from the University of Sri Lanka, and received his PhD degree in Signal Processing from Keele University, 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, U.K., for ten years from 1989 to 1999.
His research interests include speaker and language recognition, emotion detection and biomedical signal processing. For his contributions to speaker recognition research, he was a Faculty Associate with the Institute of Infocomm Research (A*STAR), Singapore in 2009-2018, and is currently an Advisory Board member of the AI Speech Lab at AI Singapore. Professor Ambikairajah was an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Education from 2012-2019.
Professor Ambikairajah was an APSIPA Distinguished Lecturer for the 2013-14 term. He is a Fellow and a Chartered Engineer of the IET UK and Engineers Australia (EA) and is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a Life Member of APSIPA.