Gary Sullivan (engineer) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Gary J. Sullivan is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

electrical engineer

Engineer

An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical problems. Engineers design materials, structures, machines and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality,...

who led the development of the H.264/AVC video coding standard and created the DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) API/DDI

Device driver

In computing, a device driver or software driver is a computer program allowing higher-level computer programs to interact with a hardware device....

video decoding feature of the Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

operating system platform. He was the chairman of the Joint Video Team (JVT) standardization committee that developed the H.264/AVC standard, and he edited large portions of it. Since January 2010, his current primary activity is co-chairman of the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding for developing the High Efficiency Video Coding

High Efficiency Video Coding

High Efficiency Video Coding is a draft video compression standard, a successor to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC , currently under joint development by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group . MPEG and VCEG have established a Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding to...

standard. He has also led and contributed to a number of other video and image related standardization projects such as extensions of ITU-T

ITU-T

The ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector is one of the three sectors of the International Telecommunication Union ; it coordinates standards for telecommunications....

H.263

H.263 is a video compression standard originally designed as a low-bitrate compressed format for videoconferencing. It was developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group in a project ending in 1995/1996 as one member of the H.26x family of video coding standards in the domain of the ITU-T.H.263...

video coding and the standardization of JPEG XR image coding, and has published research work on various topics relating to video and image compression.

Recognitions and awards for Sullivan (and the projects he has led in the standardization community) have included the following:

IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award
IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award
The IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award is a Technical Field Award of the IEEE given for outstanding contributions to consumer electronics technology. It is named in honor of Masaru Ibuka, co-founder and honorary chairman of Sony Corporation. The award is currently given each year to an...

, 2012.
Fellow of the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) for achievements in video and image compression technologies, 2009.
J. B. Speed
J. B. Speed School of Engineering
Speed Scientific School was founded in 1924 as part of the University of Louisville in the U.S. state of Kentucky with money from the James Breckenridge Speed Foundation which was created by his children William S. Speed and Olive Speed Sackett to honor J. B. Speed.In 2004, the J.B. Speed...

Professional Award in Engineering, 2009.
Paired Technology & Engineering Emmy Award
Technology & Engineering Emmy Award
A Technology and Engineering Emmy Award is given by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for outstanding achievement in technical or engineering development...

s – one awarded to VCEG and one to MPEG by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences or NATAS was created in 1955 to advance the arts and sciences of television. Headquartered in New York, NATAS's membership is national and the organization has local chapters around the country....

for development of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC is a standard for video compression, and is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high definition video...

standard, 2009.
Primetime Emmy Engineering Award
Primetime Emmy Award
The Primetime Emmy Awards are awards presented by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in recognition of excellence in American primetime television programming...

– awarded to the JVT standards committee by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for development of the High Profile of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC is a standard for video compression, and is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high definition video...

, 2008.
International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium
International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC)
The International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium is an organization conisiting of several companies interested in real-time, rich-media communications. Rich media includes voice and one-way data and one-way video...

(IMTC) Leadership award, 2008.
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is a non-profit professional association headquartered in New York City that is dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence...

(IEEE) Consumer Electronics Engineering Excellence Award, 2008.
Fellow of the IEEE
IEEE Fellow
An IEEE member is elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow for "unusual distinction in the profession and shall be conferred by the Board of Directors upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest"...

for contributions to video coding and its standardization, 2006.
The video coding work of the ITU-T
ITU-T
The ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector is one of the three sectors of the International Telecommunication Union ; it coordinates standards for telecommunications....

led by Sullivan for the preceding ten years was voted as the most influential area of the standardization work of the CCITT and ITU-T in their 50-year history, 2006.
Technical Achievement award of the International Committee on Technology Standards
INCITS
The InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards, or INCITS , is an ANSI-accredited forum of IT developers. It was formerly known as the X3 and NCITS....

(INCITS) for his work on H.264/AVC and other video standardization topics, 2005.

Sullivan has held the following chairmanships in video coding standardization organizations:

Rapporteur
Rapporteur
Rapporteur is used in international and European legal and political contexts to refer to a person appointed by a deliberative body to investigate an issue or a situation....

/chairman of the ITU-T
ITU-T
The ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector is one of the three sectors of the International Telecommunication Union ; it coordinates standards for telecommunications....

Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG
VCEG
The Video Coding Experts Group or Visual Coding Experts Group is the informal name of Question 6 of Working Party 3 of Study Group 16 of the ITU-T. Its abbreviated title is ITU-T Q.6/SG 16...

) – since 1996.
Chairman and co-chairman of the video part of the ISO/IEC
International Electrotechnical Commission
The International Electrotechnical Commission is a non-profit, non-governmental international standards organization that prepares and publishes International Standards for all electrical, electronic and related technologies – collectively known as "electrotechnology"...

Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) – chairman March 2001 – May 2002, co-chairman since May 2002.
Chairman and co-chairman of the Joint Video Team (JVT) – chairman for the development of the next generation H.264/AVC video coding standard and its fidelity-range extensions (FRExt), and co-chairman for the development of the Scalable Video Coding
Scalable Video Coding
Scalable Video Coding is the name for the Annex G extension of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video compression standard. SVC standardizes the encoding of a high-quality video bitstream that also contains one or more subset bitstreams. A subset video bitstream is derived by dropping packets from the...

(SVC) and Multiview Video Coding
Multiview Video Coding
Multiview Video Coding is an amendment to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video compression standard developed with joint efforts by MPEG/VCEG that enables efficient encoding of sequences captured simultaneously from multiple cameras using a single video stream....

(MVC) extensions.
Co-chairman of Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding for developing the High Efficiency Video Coding
High Efficiency Video Coding
High Efficiency Video Coding is a draft video compression standard, a successor to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC , currently under joint development by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group . MPEG and VCEG have established a Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding to...

standard – since January 2010.
Liaison representative to MPEG and JPEG
Joint Photographic Experts Group
The Joint Photographic Experts Group is the joint committee between ISO/IEC JTC1 and ITU-T that created the JPEG, JPEG 2000, and JPEG XR standards. It is one of two sub-groups of ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 29, Working Group 1 - titled as Coding of still pictures...

from ITU-T on video and image coding topics.

The JVT and JCT-VC have been joint projects between the VCEG

VCEG

The Video Coding Experts Group or Visual Coding Experts Group is the informal name of Question 6 of Working Party 3 of Study Group 16 of the ITU-T. Its abbreviated title is ITU-T Q.6/SG 16...

and MPEG organizations.

Sullivan received B.S.

Bachelor of Science

A Bachelor of Science is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years .-Australia:In Australia, the BSc is a 3 year degree, offered from 1st year on...

and M.Eng.

Master of Engineering

A Master of Engineering or Master of Technology or Master of Science in Engineering A Master of Engineering (Magister in Ingeniaria) (abbreviated M.Eng., ME or MEng) or Master of Technology (abbreviated M.Tech. or MTech) or Master of Science in Engineering A Master of Engineering (Magister in...

degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Louisville

University of Louisville

The University of Louisville is a public university in Louisville, Kentucky. When founded in 1798, it was the first city-owned public university in the United States and one of the first universities chartered west of the Allegheny Mountains. The university is mandated by the Kentucky General...

J. B. Speed School of Engineering

Speed Scientific School was founded in 1924 as part of the University of Louisville in the U.S. state of Kentucky with money from the James Breckenridge Speed Foundation which was created by his children William S. Speed and Olive Speed Sackett to honor J. B. Speed.In 2004, the J.B. Speed...

, Kentucky, in 1982 and 1983, respectively. He received Ph.D.

Doctor of Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...

and Engineer

Engineer's degree

An engineer's degree is an advanced academic degree in engineering that is conferred in Europe, some countries of Latin America, and a few institutions in the United States....

degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles

University of California, Los Angeles

The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...

, in 1991.

Sullivan holds the position of Principal Software Development Engineer in the Win PLAN group of the Windows Division of Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

Corporation. At Microsoft he also designed and remains lead engineer for the DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) API/DDI video decoding feature of the Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

operating system platform. His DXVA designs include decoding acceleration schemes for H.261

H.261

H.261 is a ITU-T video coding standard, ratified in November 1988. It is the first member of the H.26x family of video coding standards in the domain of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group , and was the first video codec that was useful in practical terms.H.261 was originally designed for...

, MPEG-1

MPEG-1

MPEG-1 is a standard for lossy compression of video and audio. It is designed to compress VHS-quality raw digital video and CD audio down to 1.5 Mbit/s without excessive quality loss, making video CDs, digital cable/satellite TV and digital audio broadcasting possible.Today, MPEG-1 has become...

, H.262

H.262

H.262 or MPEG-2 Part 2 is a digital video compression and encoding standard developed and maintained jointly by ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group and ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group . It is the second part of the ISO/IEC MPEG-2 standard...

/MPEG-2

MPEG-2

MPEG-2 is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods which permit storage and transmission of movies using currently available storage media and transmission...

, H.263

H.263

, MPEG-4 Part 2

MPEG-4 Part 2

MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Visual is a video compression technology developed by MPEG. It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standards. It is a discrete cosine transform compression standard, similar to previous standards such as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2...

, H.264/AVC, Windows Media Video

Windows Media Video

'Windows Media Video is a video compression format for several proprietary codecs developed by Microsoft. The original video format, known as WMV, was originally designed for Internet streaming applications, as a competitor to RealVideo. The other formats, such as WMV Screen and WMV Image, cater...

versions 8 and 9, and VC-1

VC-1

VC-1 is the informal name of the SMPTE 421M video codec standard, which was initially developed as a proprietary video format by Microsoft before it was released as a formal SMPTE standard video format on April 3, 2006...

.

Prior to joining Microsoft in 1999, he was the manager of communications core research at PictureTel Corporation

PictureTel Corp.

PictureTel Corp was one of the first commercial videoconferencing product companies. It achieved peak revenues of over $400 million in 1996 and 1997 and was eventually acquired by Polycom in October 2001.-History:...

, the former world leader in videoconferencing communication. He was previously a Howard Hughes Fellow and member of technical staff in the Advanced Systems Division of Hughes Aircraft Corporation, and a terrain-following radar system software engineer for Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments Inc. , widely known as TI, is an American company based in Dallas, Texas, United States, which develops and commercializes semiconductor and computer technology...

See also

Video Coding Standardization Organizations

Video Coding Standards

DirectX Video Acceleration