__NOTOC__ Henrique "Rico" S. Malvar (born 1957) is a distinguished

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

ian engineer and a

signal processing Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focuses on analyzing, modifying and synthesizing ''signals'', such as audio signal processing, sound, image processing, images, and scientific measurements. Signal processing techniq ...

researcher at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

's largest laboratory in

Redmond, Washington Redmond is a city in King County, Washington, United States, located east of Seattle. The population was 73,256 at the 2020 census, up from 54,144 in 2010. Redmond is best known as the home of Microsoft and Nintendo of America. With an an ...

, United States. He was the managing director of the lab following the departure of long-time Managing Director Dan Ling in 2007, when he oversaw about 350 researchers. Currently, he is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft Research. Rico is also an Affiliate Professor at th
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

History and contributions

Malvar earned his bachelor's degree at the

University of Brasília The University of Brasília ( pt, Universidade de Brasília, UnB) is a federal public university in Brasília, the capital of Brazil. It was founded in 1960 and has since consistently been named among the top five Brazilian universities and the ...

and his master's degree at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

(MIT) in 1986, where his thesis was on "Optimal pre- and post-filtering in noisy sampled-data systems," and served as a visiting professor at MIT for the next year. From 1979 to 1993, Malvar was a faculty member at the University of Brasília, where he founded and headed the Digital Signal Processing Research Group (in Portuguese, ''Grupo de Processamento Digital de Sinais'' or GPDS). Malvar is known for the development of the lapped transform, Malvar wavelets, and new algorithms for entropy coding and multimedia signal processing and compression, such as audio and image codecs. In industry, Malvar served as vice president of Research and Advanced Technology at

PictureTel PictureTel Corporation, often shortened to PictureTel Corp., was one of the first commercial videoconferencing product companies. It achieved peak revenues of over $490 million in 1996 and 1997 and was eventually acquired by Polycom in October ...

from 1985 to 1987 (which has since been acquired by

Polycom Poly, formerly Polycom, a part of HP Inc., is an American multinational corporation that develops video, voice and content collaboration and communication technology. Polycom was co-founded in 1990 by Brian L Hinman and Jeffrey Rodman. In 2018 P ...

). In Fall 1997, he joined

where he co-founded and managed the Signal Processing research group, now the Communication and Collaboration Systems and Knowledge Tools groups. He was a Redmond lab director from 2004 to 2007 before stepping up to become managing director. In 2010 he took on a new position of Chief Scientist, working on cross-labs strategic projects. Currently, as a Distinguished Engineer, he leads a team that develops new user experiences with new devices and new input/output interaction modes, with special attention to inclusiveness and empowering people with disabilities. At Microsoft, Malvar contributed to the development of audio coding and

digital rights management Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures (TPM) such as access control technologies can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. ...

for the

Windows Media Audio Windows Media Audio (WMA) is a series of audio codecs and their corresponding audio coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs. The or ...

Windows Media Video Windows Media Video (WMV) is a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. WMV consists of three distinct codecs: The original video compression technology ...

, and to image compression technologies, such as

HD Photo JPEG XR (JPEG extended range) is an image compression standard for continuous tone photographic images, based on the HD Photo (formerly Windows Media Photo) specifications that Microsoft originally developed and patented. It supports both lossy a ...

/ JPEG XR formats and the RemoteFX bitmap compression, as well as to a variety of tools for signal analysis and synthesis. As of February 2022, he has published over 180 technical articles and has authored or co-authored over 120 issued patents.

Editorial and committee positions

Malvar has served as an editor or committee member for the following journals, conferences, and organizations: * Associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing * Editorial board of

Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis ''Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis'' is a bimonthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Elsevier. The journal covers studies on the applied and computational aspects of harmonic analysis. Its editors-in-chief are Ronald Coifman ...

* Technical committee for the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) * Technical committee for the Data Compression Conference (DCC) * Advisory committee for the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering * Member of the Special Nomination Committee for the National Academy of Engineering

Titles and awards

Malvar holds the following prestigious titles and awards. A sample: * 1981: The Young Scientist Award from the Marconi International Fellowship Foundation * 1992: Best Paper Award in Image Processing from the

IEEE Signal Processing Society The IEEE Signal Processing Society (IEEE SPS) is one of the nearly 40 technical societies of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the first one created. Its mission is to "advance and disseminate state-of-the-art scien ...

* 1997: Fellow of the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

(IEEE) * 2002: Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society * 2004: Wavelet Pioneer Award from SPIE * 2006: Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft. * 2012: Member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE). * 2014: 20th Century Landmark Award, IEEE Seattle Section. * 2020: Amar G. Bose Industrial Leader Award, IEEE Signal Processing Society. * 2022: Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Brasilia.

References

External links

* Bill Hinchberger. * Anais Fernandes.
Ler pensamentos é algo que não está longe
Revista Veja, portal Amarelas.com, December 2017. * Marcelo Tas.
Entrevista com Rico Malvar
. Programa Provoca, TV Cultura, March 2022. {{DEFAULTSORT:Malvar, Rico 1957 births Living people People from Rio de Janeiro (city) Brazilian computer scientists University of Brasília alumni Federal University of Rio de Janeiro alumni MIT School of Engineering alumni Microsoft employees Fellow Members of the IEEE