Leonardo Chiariglione (born 1953 or 1952
in
Almese, in the province of
Turin, Piedmont) is an Italian engineer. He is mostly known for his work in the areas of telecommunications and digital media.
He earned a masters in Electronic Engineering at the
Polytechnic of Turin (1967), then obtained his Ph.D. degree at the
University of Tokyo in 1973, where he also learned to speak Japanese. Chiariglione speaks seven languages including English and French.
From March 1971 until July 2003, he was with CSELT, the corporate research center of the
Telecom Italia group. His final position there was Vice President, Multimedia, at Telecom Italia Lab, the new name given to CSELT in 2001.
He has led a number of European collaborative projects :
- IVICO - a RACE project investigating cost-effective integrated video codecs,
- COMIS - an ESPRIT project supporting the development of the MPEG-1 standard and
- EU 625 - VADIS a EUREKA project aiming at developing a European hardware and software technology for the MPEG-2 standard.
He has initiated various efforts to define internationally agreed specifications, such as
DAVIC (the Digital Audio-Visual Council) in 1994 and
FIPA (the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) in 1996.
But the project for which he is probably best known started in 1988, when he originated the
ISO standardization activity known as
MPEG (or Moving Pictures Experts Group) (officially ISO TC97/SC2/WG8/MPEG, now ISO
IEC-JTC1/SC29/WG11), of which he has been the Convenor from the start. This group, with a membership of over 300 experts, representing 20 countries and various industries having a stake in digital audio and video, produced the
MPEG-1 and
MPEG-2 standards that have facilitated the digital audio-visual revolution.
Leonardo Chiariglione has received the
IBC 1999 John Tucker Award,
IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award (1999), and
Kilby Foundation Award (1998).
In 1999, he was asked to be the Executive Director of
Secure Digital Music Initiative, a forum comprising hundreds of companies to develop specifications for a
open standard secure
digital music delivery technology.
He stepped down from this post in 2001, having expressed frustration about conflicts between the members of the group, which had failed to produce effective anti-piracy specifications.
Leonardo Chiariglione was appointed as Distinguished Invited Professor at Information and Communication University,
Daejeon, Korea in 2004.
References and External Links
- Chiariglione and the birth of MPEG (IEEE Spectrum September 1997 Volume 34 Number 9) at Chiariglione's home page
- An interview with Leonardo Chiariglione (IEEE Spectrum January 2000 Volume 37 Number 1)
Category:Living peopleCategory:Italian engineersCategory:Year of birth uncertainit:Leonardo Chiariglione
