Leonardo Chiariglione

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Leonardo Chiariglione is an italian engineer, born in Almese (Italy), famous in the area 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. Leonardo speaks seven languages including English and French.

Since 1971, he has been with CSELT, the corporate research center of the Telecom Italia group, where he is head of the Television Technologies Research Division. He spent some 15 years there leading a number of very significant hardware and software projects .

He has led a number of European collaborative projects :

  • IVICO a RACE project investgating 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 been at the initiative of numerous 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 perhaps the project for which he is 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/WG12), of which he has been the Convenor from the start. This group, with a membership of over 300 experts, representing 20 countries and all the industries having a stake in digital audio and video, has produced the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards that have triggered the digital audio-visual revolution. Indeed, MPEG has brought to audio-visual technology such a transformation that the MPEG group won an Emmy Award (presented to Leonardo and Hiroshi Yasuda, chairman of SC29, the mother group of MPEG) for its work in 1996. MPEG-4 has been published in 2002. MPEG-7 and MPEG21 are presently under development.

Besides the Emmyn Leonardo received a number of international award. Among them we may quote IBC 1999 John Tucker Award, IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award (1999), Kilby Foundation Award (1998),

In 1999, he has been asked to be the Executive Director of Secure Digital Music Initiative, a forum comprising hundreds of companies in the development of digital music technology.[1]


Leonardo has left Telecom Italia, where he has been Vice President, Multimedia, in July 2003. He has been nominated invited Professor at Information and Communication University, Daejeon, Korea in 2004.

[edit] References and External Links

  1. ^ "Time digital 50, 19, Leonardo Chiarglione", Time Magazine.
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