Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, a University Research Chair and Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa, is an internationally-recognized scholar who has made strong contributions to the knowledge and understanding of multimedia computing, communications and applications, particularly in the digitization, communication and security of the sense of touch, or haptics, which is a new medium that is significantly changing the way in which human-to-human and human-computer interactions are performed.

Prof. El Saddik is the director of the Multimedia Communications Research Laboratory (MCRLab) and the Distributed & Collaborative Virtual Environments Research Laboratory (DISCOVER). He is Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (ACM TOMCCAP), IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (IEEE TCIAIG) and Guest Editor for several IEEE Transactions and Journals. Dr. El Saddik has been serving on several technical program committees of numerous IEEE and ACM events. He has been the General Chair and/or Technical Program Chair of more than 30 international conferences symposia and workshops on collaborative hapto-audio-visual environments, multimedia communications and instrumentation and measurement. He was the general co-chair of ACM MM 2008. He is leading researcher in haptics, service-oriented architectures, collaborative environments and ambient interactive media and communications. He has authored and co-authored three books and more than 350 publications. He has received research grants and contracts totaling more than $17 million and has supervised more than 100 researchers.