Prof Hamid Reza Abutalebi, from Yazd University, Iran, has joined the Idiap research team as a Sabbatical Professor, for a period of one year, starting beginning of October.

Prof. Abutalebi will work with Prof. Bourlard in the framework of "Array-based Speech Signal Processing".

Prof. Hamid Reza Abutalebi has received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran in 1996 and 1998, respectively and his Ph.D. from Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran in 2003, all in electrical engineering (signal processing). Also, he has been with University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada as a visiting scholar during Mar. 2002-Feb. 2003.

Since 2003, Prof. Abutalebi has been with Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Yazd University, Yazd, Iran , where he is now an associate professor. He has also acted there as the director of Speech Processing Research Lab (SPRL), Yazd University, Yazd, Iran . He is also an IEEE Senior Member and an ISCA Member. His research interests are microphone arrays, speech enhancement, sound source localization, and time-frequency analysis.