Ashfaq Khokhar has been appointed chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, effective Friday, August 16,
ECE Chair Ashfaq Khokhar
2013. Khokhar joins Illinois Institute of Technology from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where he is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Department of Computer Science, and the Department of Biomedical and Health Information Sciences. Currently, he also serves as Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UIC.
He earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1985; an M.S. in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University in 1989; and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California in 1993. Khokhar is also president and chief technology officer of Video Analytica, Inc., a Woodridge, Ill.-based startup that develops scalable and computationally efficient solutions for multimedia applications, including smart and intelligent video surveillance technologies.
Khokhar’s research centers on context-aware wireless networks, computational biology, health care data mining, content-based multimedia modeling, retrieval and multimedia communication, and high-performance algorithms. He is considered a leading expert in the area of high-performance solutions for multimedia applications, especially those that are data or communication intensive. Under his directorship, the research group at UIC’s Multimedia Systems Lab has grown substantially. His lab has graduated more than 20 Ph.D. students in the last 10 years.
Khokhar has contributed to five edited volumes and co-authored nine book chapters, 53 publications in archival journals, and 158 refereed conference papers. Additionally, he has presented his work and has served as program chair at several prominent conferences. His research is currently supported by multiple awards funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health. In the recent past, Khokhar’s research has also been supported by the United States Army, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The funding level associated with these activities has been well over $10 million to date.
Khokhar has extensive teaching experience and is highly committed to both graduate and undergraduate education. Over the years, he has developed new graduate courses in the areas of parallel computing and multimedia systems. At UIC, he revised the contents of several existing graduate and undergraduate courses to adapt to the rapid changes in the field and to reflect the latest research trends. Khokhar has actively pursued reorganization of the undergraduate curriculum in the computer engineering and computer science areas and has collaborated with his colleagues to streamline the contents of different courses and link them to state-of-the-art trends in the computer industry.
Additionally, he has initiated a dialogue about multidisciplinary approaches at UIC, pushing to cross-list overlapping courses in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science, and successfully pursing multidisciplinary research projects in collaboration with the college of business, college of medicine, college of nursing, and college of liberal arts and sciences.
Khokhar has received various types of scholarly recognition and awards, including the NSF CAREER Award in 1998 for his work on multi-threaded algorithms for multimedia applications. In 1996, he won an Outstanding Paper Award for his presentation at the International Conference on Parallel Processing. He has served as associate editor on the editorial board of numerous journals. Khokhar was elected an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow in 2009 for his work on multimedia computing and databases.