Post-Doc Riadh Ksantini Receives Industrial Research & Development Fellowship

Computer Science’s post-doctoral fellow, Riadh Ksantini received a fellowship with the NSERC’s Industrial R & D Research Fellowship Program funding him for a period of two years. This program supports the most auspicious doctoral candidates immersed in research and development in the private sector through financial contribution.

The purpose of this program is to encourage excellent PH.D. Graduates to follow a career path and gain experience in the Canadian private, non-profit or governmental sectors, promote awareness of the capabilities of Canadian research and universities and to facilitate the transfer of expertise and technology.

Dr. Ksantini is working with Dr. Boufama and his area of research “Statistical Pattern Recognition Techniques for Automatic Object Recognition” has already been successfully applied to many problems including speech recognition, motion recognition (surveillance systems), face recognition, automatic target recognition and image classification. He has proposed a novel classification model which allows much more flexibility and significantly better dimensionality reduction and classification performance than some existing linear models proposed in the machine-learning community. Moreover, his model was successfully applied in recognition of faces. In fact, face recognition is central to many applications, such as video surveillance (security), race and gender classification (sociology), identity retrieval from a database for criminal and forensic applications, and has become one of the most challenging tasks in the pattern recognition fields.

Dr. Ksantini recently came onboard with the University of Windsor’s School of Computer Science as a postdoctoral research associate with Dr. Boufama in 2007. He is currently working on Image Segmentation. His research interests also lie in image processing, computer vision, numerical media, machine learning, pattern recognition, data mining and applied mathematics.

Dr. Ksantini is married and has a young son. He spends his spare time with his family and has begun playing soccer on a daily basis.