Ehsan Maani was born in 1981 in Tehran, Iran. He received his B.Sc. from Sharif Univesity of Tech. in Tehran in the field of theoretical physics. He later joined IVPL at Northwestern in 2004 and received his M.Sc. from Northwestern University in 2007. His thesis title was "Optimal Cross-Layer Resource Allocation for Real-Time Video Transmission". He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. under supervision of Prof. Katsaggelos with a focus on efficient scalable video delivery over wireless and ad-hoc networks.
In summer 2007, Ehsan worked as an intern for Neokast, LLC. His mission was to develop and implement a rate shaping and packet prioritization algorithm for P2P video streaming. He later continued his work with Neokast and developed a video "fingerprinting" algorithm for video copy identification in a database. During summer 2008 he interned at the Image Technology group at Dolby Laboratories Inc., in Burbank, California, where he developed a mode decision SDK for flexible implementation of fast mode decision algorithms. His contributions to the H.264/AVC reference software include the implementation of Adaptive Rounding (initial implementation and rewrite for the low and high complexities, respectively) and Bi-prediction support for sub-macroblock partitions.