Apostolopoulos named IEEE Fellow

By Jamie Beckett, November 2007

John Apostolopoulos, a distinguished technologist and manager of the HP Labs Streaming Media Systems Group, has been chosen as an IEEE Fellow.

Apostolopoulos was recognized for his contributions to "the principles and practice of video communications and secure media streaming." His research focus is on improving the reliability, fidelity, scalability, and security of media communication over wired and wireless packet networks. This work includes innovations in compression and networking that use multiple network paths to overcome the challenges of network congestion and packet loss.

Recently, his work on secure media streaming that simultaneously provides end-to-end security and media adaptation in the middle of the network was adopted part of the new JPSEC standard for JPEG-2000 image security.

Standards and academic work

Apostolopoulos serves as vice-chair of the IEEE Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IMDSP) technical committee and is a member of the Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) technical committee. He is also HP's primary representative to the Moving Picture Experts Group (commonly referred to as MPEG), which is charged with developing video and audio encoding standards.

In addition to these activities, Apostolopoulos is a consulting associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University where he teaches and conducts joint research. He's also a visiting lecturer at MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and he mentors graduate students and serves on the thesis committees of students from Stanford, MIT and University of Pennsylvania.

Awards and publications

He has received several awards for his technical achievements. MIT Technology Review selected him as one of the world's top young innovators in science and technology in 2003. He contributed to the U.S. Digital TV standard while in graduate school and his team received a technical Emmy. Several of his publications have merited best paper awards – most recently, a paper on authentication for streaming media was selected as best paper at the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) 2006.

He also has been active as an editor of technical journals. Recently he co-edited a special issue of IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Signal Processing on network-aware multimedia processing and communications and was a guest editor of a special issue of IEEE Network on multimedia over broadband wireless networks.