Thomas Wiegand: H.264/MPEG-AVC Co-Chair

Thomas Wiegand

THOMAS WIEGAND is a professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin and is jointly heading the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Berlin, Germany. He received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, Germany, in 1995 and the Dr.-Ing. degree from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, in 2000. As a student, he was a Visiting Researcher at Kobe University, Japan, the University of California at Santa Barbara and Stanford University, USA, where he also returned as a visiting professor. He was a consultant to Skyfire, Inc., Mountain View, CA, and is currently a consultant to Vidyo, Inc., Hackensack, NJ, USA. Since 1995, he has been an active participant in standardization for multimedia with many successful submissions to ITU-T and ISO/IEC. In 2000, he was appointed as the Associated Rapporteur of ITU-T VCEG and from 2005-2009, he was Co-Chair of ISO/IEC MPEG Video.

The projects that he co-chaired for the development of the H.264/MPEG-AVC standard have been recognized by an ATAS Primetime Emmy Engineering Award and a pair of NATAS Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards. For his research in video coding and transmission, he received numerous awards including the Vodafone Innovations Award, the EURASIP Group Technical Achievement Award, the Eduard Rhein Technology Award, the Karl Heinz Beckurts Award, the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Technical Field Award, and the IMTC Leadership Award. He received multiple best paper awards for his publications. Thomson Reuters named Wiegand in their list of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds 2014” as one of the most cited researchers in his field.

Co-inventor of the TCP/IP Protocol: Robert E. Kahn

Robert E. Kahn

ROBERT E. KAHN is Chairman, CEO and President of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), which he founded in 1986 after a 13-year term at the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). CNRI is a not-forprofit organization for research and development of the National Information Infrastructure.

Following a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from the City College of New York in 1960, and MA and PhD degrees from Princeton University in 1962 and 1964 respectively, Dr Kahn worked at AT&T and Bell Laboratories before he became Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He took a leave of absence from MIT to join Bolt Beranek and Newman, where he was responsible for the system design of the Arpanet, the first packet-switched network.

In 1972, Dr Kahn moved to DARPA and subsequently became Director of its Information Processing Techniques Office. There he initiated the United States government’s Strategic Computing Program. Dr Kahn conceived the idea of open architecture networking. He is a co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol, and was responsible for originating DARPA’s Internet Program.

More recently, Kahn has developed the concept of a digital object architecture to provide a framework for interoperability of heterogeneous information systems. He is also co-inventor of Knowbot programmes, mobile software agents in the network environment.

Among his numerous awards, Kahn received the ITU World Telecommunication and Information Society Award in 2010, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, and the National Medal of Technology in 1997.

Mark I. Krivocheev: Laureate of ITU 150 Years Celebrations

Mark I. Krivocheev

MARK I. KRIVOCHEEV was born in the USSR on 30 July 1922. He graduated from the Moscow Telecommunications Institute in 1946. In 1966, he became Doctor of Technical Sciences and in 1968, he was awarded the rank of Professor. In 1992, he became a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Technological Sciences of the Russian Federation. Mark I. Krivocheev is best known outside Russia for his work in the International Radio Consultative Committee (CCIR) of the International Telecommunication Union. In 1970 he became Vice–Chairman of CCIR Study Group 11 (Television) and in 1974 he was elected Chairman. His function was to coordinate studies in television broadcasting. The proposal for a world television digital standard (Recommendation 601) earned ITU-R the Emmy Engineering Award. Other recent texts of prime importance adopted by the ITU-R are Basic parameter values for the HDTV standard for the studio and for international programme exchange (Recommendation 709); Method for the subjective assessment of the quality of television pictures, etc. in high–definition television (Recommendations 500–4 and 710).

He has received many government awards and the USSR State Prize. In 2007, he was named laureate of the ITU World Telecommunication and Information Society Award. The Montreux Symposium gave him its Gold Medal in 1987, and the EBU awarded him a certificate on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the CCIR in 1988. In 1990, following the adoption of CCIR Recommendations on HDTV, his achievements were praised around the world: NANBA awarded him a special plaque, the Australian Department of Communications and Broadcasting awarded him a certificate, and France has made him a Chevalier de l’Ordre National de Mérite.