Avideh Zakhor (Persian: آویده زاخور, born 1964) is an Iranian-American electrical engineer, the Qualcomm Chair in Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research involves video processing including video coding, decoding, and streaming, as well as urban-scale 3D modeling.
Zakhor is originally from Tehran, where her father was a businessman, the founder of Iran's first button factory; her interest in engineering stems from a fascination with the machines in his factory. She was a high school exchange student at Atlantic College in Wales when the Iranian Revolution caused the rest of her family to flee Iran, settling in Los Angeles in the late 1970s. After finishing high school in Wales, she studied electrical engineering as an undergraduate at the California Institute of Technology, graduating in 1983. Before falling, the former government of Iran had paid for her schooling in Wales, but its promise of continued funding for university study did not materialize; instead, she obtained student funding from General Motors, supplementing it with Caltech's Henry Ford II Scholar Award. Continuing her studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she earned a master's degree in 1985 and completed her Ph.D. in 1987. She attributes her quick finish to a desire to leave the cold weather of Boston. Her doctoral dissertation, Reconstruction of multidimensional signals from multiple level threshold crossings, was supervised by Alan V. Oppenheim.
She became an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988. She was the second woman faculty member to join the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, after computer scientist Susan L. Graham, and the department's first woman electrical engineering professor.
While continuing at Berkeley, she co-founded OPC Technology in 1996, a software supplier to the integrated circuit manufacturing industry which after several acquisitions became part of Siemens. In 2005, she founded UrbanScan, a company for building 3D city models; it was acquired by Google in 2007 and its models became an important part of Google Earth. She founded a third 3d modeling company, Indoor Reality, in 2015; it was acquired in 2019.
Zakhor was a 1990 recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award. She was named as an IEEE Fellow in 2002, "for contributions to image and video compression".
She was named as the electronic imaging scientist of the year at Electronic Imaging 2018, the annual symposium of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, "for significant contributions to signal processing, including 3D image processing & computer vision; 3D reality capture systems; 3D modeling, mapping and positioning; and image and video compression and communication".
Zakhor married another MIT student and Berkeley electrical engineering professor, Seth Sanders.