Senior Director
Advanced Technology Labs

Born and educated in Egypt, Tarek received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1994, where he studied modeling of electromagnetic fields and signal processing. While at Purdue, he received the Geddes-Hauptman award for outstanding researcher at Purdue Electrical Engineering Dept., 1993.

Elabbady joined the Medtronic research team as a research scientist and contributed to new product designs for heart rhythm detection algorithms, implantable bio monitors and designs of external defibrillation devices. He authored several publications and patents in the field of signal processing and design of medical systems, while at Medtronic.

After receiving his MBA from the University of Washington in 1999, Tarek joined Microsoft in the Windows group where he led a variety of the Windows development programs. His contributions included audio/video home networking, supporting networking technologies and hardware software interfaces. His most notable contribution was to the foundation of the Microsoft Windows Media Center division in 2002.

In 2005, Elabbady founded the Advanced Technology Labs Cairo and moved back to his home country, Egypt, to establish the first Microsoft R&D Lab in the Middle East and Africa. ATL Cairo focuses on digital content services technologies and its research spans Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning and Computer Vision. In addition, ATL Cairo is renowned for its contributions to Arabic language (AL) technologies.

In 2010 Tarek was appointed as the Senior Director of Microsoft Advanced Technology Labs. Located in Brussels, Belgium, he directs Microsoft Research's Advanced Technology Labs in Europe and the Middle East and Africa.