Data compression expert named IEEE Fellow

By Jamie Beckett – Dec. 2006

Marcelo Weinberger, who is widely recognized for his work in the theory and practice of data compression, has been selected as a Fellow by the IEEE. The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the Board of Directors upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest.

Weinberger's contributions include mathematical information theoretic foundations, algorithm design andapplied research in image compression. He has also made key contributions to international standards.

He is best known for his work on universal context modeling and its application to lossless image compression. He was a coauthor of the LOCO-I ((LOw COmplexity LOssless COmpression for Images) algorithm, which is at the core of the JPEG-LS lossless image compression standard.

The algorithm is used in a variety of applications. NASA recently relied on LOCO-I to transmit accurate, high-resolution images from its Mars Spirit Rover back to Earth.

Weinberger was an editor of the standard JPEG-LS specification and also contributed to the coding algorithm of the JPEG2000 image compression standard.

More recently, Weinberger made pioneering contributions to sequential decision problems, universal simulation, discrete denoising and filtering. He was part of the team that invented DUDE, the first universal discrete denoising algorithm. Earlier this year, the team received the IEEE Communication Society and Information Theory Joint Paper Award, given annually to recognize an outstanding paper published in the societies' main journals.

Weinberger, who manages HP Labs' Information Theory Research group, joined HP Labs in 1993. Before joining HP, he was a Visiting Scientist at IBM Almaden Research Center San Jose, California, and earlier, he was a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa. He holds both M.Sc. and D.Sc. degrees from Technion.

Weinberger is widely published and holds numerous patents. He was Associate Editor for Source Coding of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 1999 to 2002, and was in the program committee of all the major information theory and data compression conferences.