Irene Cheng, SMIEEE, is the Scientific Director of the Multimedia Research Centre (MRC) and an Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Canada. Her research interests, among others, include incorporating human perception "Just-Noticeable-Difference" following psychophysical methodology, to improve multimedia transmission techniques. She completed her PhD at the University of Alberta in 2005 and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining academia, she was a regional Information Technology executive in Lloyds Bank International Far East Division. Her duties involved computer systems implementation, accounting, system analysis, user training and administration, travelling extensively in Asia and England. In 2006-7, she designed a multimedia framework incorporating innovative interactive 3D item types for online multimedia education, and led the development team to implement the Computer Reinforced Online Multimedia Education (CROME) System (http://crome.cs.ualberta.ca). She received an Alumni Recognition Award in 2008 from the University of Alberta for her R&D contributions. She has received, or been offered, many scholarships and fellowships from NSERC, iCORE and others. Currently, she is involved with research in 3DTV and perceptually motivated technologies in multimedia, high-dimensional visualization and transmission. She serves as program chair, and as TC member in numerous conferences, which include IEEE ICME 2008-2010 and International Symposium on Visual Computing 2006-2009.

Dr. Cheng is the Chair of the IEEE Northern Canada Section, Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Chapter (2009-2011), Board Member of the IEEE System, Man and Cybernetics (SMC) Society, Human Perception in Vision, Graphics and Multimedia TC, and the Chair of the IEEE Communication Society, Multimedia Communications TC Interest Group on 3D rendering, processing and communications (2010-2012). Her organized workshops include ICCV-S3DV and ACM MM-iWAM in 2009, CVPR-S3D in 2008 and ISVC special tracks from 2006-09. She also organized special sessions in ISM 2006, ICME 2007, EMBC 2008 and the NCS EMBS Chapter Biomedical workshop in 2009 in conjunction with the IEEE 125th Anniversary. She is a guest editor for IJDMB special issue on Adv. in 3DTV. She has over one hundred publications including three books, international journals and peer-reviewed conference papers.