Levent Onural

Office: EA206

Bilkent University

Bilkent, Ankara TR-06800 Turkey

Phone: Office: +90 312 290 1263 or +90 312 266 4307 (Secretary)

FAX: +90 312 266 4192

Email:

Currently, he is the Coordinator of EC funded 3DTV Project, and the Co-leader of the newly formed 3D Media Cluster .

Biographical sketch

Levent Onural was born in Izmir, Turkey in 1957. He got his junior high-school education at Izmir Koleji ("Izmir College"; now called BAL), and his senior high-school education at Ankara Fen Lisesi ("Ankara Science High-School"). He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Middle East Technical University , Ankara, Turkey, in 1979 and 1981, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from State University of New York at Buffalo in 1985.

He was a Fulbright scholar between 1981 and 1985. After a Research Assistant Professor position at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of State University of New York at Buffalo, he joined the Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department of Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, where he is a Professor at present. Dr. Onural received a TUBITAK award in 1995, and an IEEE Third Millenium Medal in 2000.

His current research interests are in the areas of image and video processing with emphasis on very low bit rate video coding, texture modeling, non-linear filtering, holographic TV and signal processing aspects of optical wave propagation. He has published more than 150 papers and received about 1000 citations. (Publications). In 2006 and 2007, two papers that Onural co-authored ranked among the top cited papers published in IEEE Transactions on CSVT. He was a member of the COST211ter Project Management Committee and the director of the Turkish COST211 Team team between 1991-1997. He and his team have contributed to MPEG-4 activities through COST211 Analysis Model. COST211ter project was a research collaboration activity of European Union; more information can be found here. Levent Onural has a video object segmentation patent. ( US 6,337,917 ). Currently, he is the Coordinator of EC funded 3DTV Project.

Dr. Onural is a fellow of IEEE. He was the organizer and the first chairman (1990-1991) of IEEE Turkey Section; and the chairman (1994-1996) of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Turkey Chapter. He served as the vice-chair of IEEE Region 8 (Europe, Africa and Middle East(1995-1998), and the vice-chair of the Regional Activities Board (RAB) of IEEE (1998-1999) -in charge of student activities; he also served as the chair of the IEEE RAB Student Activities Committee (1998-1999). Dr. Onural was a general co-chair of IEEE 2000 International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing ICASSP'2000. He was the Director of IEEE Region 8 (Europe, Africa and Middle East) (2001-2002) and a member of IEEE Board of Directors, which is the highest board of IEEE, between 2001-2003. He was a member of IEEE Assembly in 2001-2002. He served as the 2003 Secretary of IEEE, and he was a member of IEEE Executive Committee in 2003. Levent Onural was nominated by the IEEE Board of Directors to the position of 2005 IEEE Preident-elect (2006 IEEE President); he is the first person from outside of North America nominated for this position in 120 years of history of IEEE. Levent Onural is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology.

IEEE Third Millenium Medal:

He is married to Canan, and father of Engin and Deniz.

Last update: 22 May 2008