Fellowships

• Member of the United States' National Academy of Engineering (NAE)
• Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineers, since 2001
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, since 1999
• Fellow of the IEEE, since 1998
• Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada, since 1997

Awards for Mentoring

• Recipient of the Outstanding Mentor/Sponsor Award of Wendy McDonald Awards, 2017.
• Killam Award for Excellence in Mentoring, UBC, 2013.

These mentoring awards are the most satisfying to me, and the dearest awards to my heart, as my strongest passion is to work, help and mentor students.

Awards for Service

• Meritorious Service Award of IEEE Signal Processing Society, 2013.
• UBC Engineering Co-op “Faculty of the Year“ Award, 2010.

Awards for Academic Excellence

• Recipient of Centennial Gold Medal, UBC Applied Science, 2016.
• CUFA BC “Career Achievement Award”, May 2011. (CUFA is the association representing all professors in all B.C. universities). This is the highest of the 3 awards it gives each year.
• “Distinction Award” for being the first in Lebanon in the 1960 Scientific Baccalaureate national Exam. All students in Lebanon had to take this exam or another one if they were not in the science stream.

Prizes for Research Excellence

• Recipient of the UBC Killam Research Prize, 1998.

Awards for Leadership and Research and Professional Achievements

• IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing, 2023.
• Paradigm Shifter Award of the Society for Canadian Women in Science and Technology, Nov 2011.
• Millennium Award, IEEE Vancouver Chapter, Aug 2011.
• WYCA Woman of Distinction Award, 2008.
• The “Society Award” of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, 2008. This is the highest and most prestigious award of this society, emphasizing technical leadership and achievements in the field.
• R.A. McLachlan Award of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia, 2007. Amongst its nine awards, this is the top and most prestigious, emphasizing education, research, innovation in engineering, and community service.
• Registered Professional Engineer (of the BC Professional Engineers Association).

Best Paper Awards

• IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award (2018) went to our paper: "Deep Sentence Embedding Using Long Short-Term Memory Networks: Analysis and Application to Information Retrieval" IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, Volume 24, Number 4, April 2016.
• Best Paper Award of IS&T International Symposium on Electronic Imaging, “Fast Edge-Directed Single Image Super-resolution” by N. Rouf and R. K. Ward, 2016.
• Our paper “Conversion of H.264 Encoded 2D Video to 3D Format” received the Best Paper Award of the IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics, January 2010.
• A Best Student Paper Award went to my student, Shan Du, at the IEEE ICASSP 2005 for a jointly co-authored paper.
• Co-recipient of the prestigious “Excellence in Neural Engineering Award” 2005, from the IEEE-EMBS Neural Engineering Conference and sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research Global and IEEE-EMBS. This was the highest paper award given at the conference emphasizing innovative projects integrating engineering and neuroscience. The paper title is “A New Design of the Computer Interface Using the Knowledge of the Path of Features,” coauthored by A. Bashashati, myself and G. Birch
• The Best Paper Award in the Inter. Conf. on Information Technology Research and Education, New Jersey, USA, August 2003, “A Robust Method for Fitting the (Sigma, Rho) Model to a Traffic Source.”
• The Best Paper Award with my student P. Mousavi at the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology International Conference, July 2000.
• Best Student Paper Award went to my student P. Mousavi for the paper "Feature Analysis and Classification of Homologous Chromosome lbs Using Fluorescence Microscopy Images" co-authored by myself, IEEE CCECE Conference 1999
• Four Best Paper Awards of the, BC Advanced Systems Institute Exchange: These were:
  • March 2002, (co-authored with Alexandre Paquet)
  • March 1998 (co-authored with K. Barzykina and P. Nasiopoulos)
  • March 1998 (co-authored with P. Mousavi)
  • March 1997 (co-authored with K. Archer and D. Forsey)
• The Rhodesian Institution of Engineers Award for 1978-1979 for the paper "Operations Research and Applications for Rhodesia".

Scholarships and Early Distinctions Awards

• Full scholarship from the Lebanese Council for Scientific Research to do graduate work in Electrical Engineering in Berkeley, California (5 years).
• Won the Egyptian government scholarship award to study engineering or medicine (5 years).
• Won the American University of Beirut Scholarship award to study medicine (but declined it because I wanted to study engineering. Women were not allowed at that time to study engineering at the American University of Beirut in 1961).