IMTC Recognizes Technology Leaders.

SAN RAMON, Calif. -- The International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC) presented Leadership Awards to three industry visionaries and leaders at its Spring Forum, held in Eibsee, Germany, May 10-12.

One of the distinguished recipients, Dr. Wen-Hsiung Chen, made a point of emphasizing the value of the IMTC Forums and SuperOp. "Cisco is an active member of the IMTC because we are focused on advancing IP-based video telephony and conferencing capabilities, and the IMTC provides the opportunity to test applications across mixed platforms and architectures. Also, the IMTC Forum is an excellent opportunity to keep in touch with emerging trends and technologies that will advance multimedia capabilities."

The IMTC presented its prestigious Leadership Awards to Dr. Gisle Bjontegaard, Principal Scientist for Tandberg, for his long and outstanding career in video compression research and video coding standardization in CCITT, ITU and ISO. The results of his research and numerous contributions are integral parts of today's modern video coding standards, such as H.261, H.263, H.264, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4; Dr. Chen, a Fellow at Cisco Systems, for his pioneering contributions to the field of digital imaging, including the Slant Transform for image coding, the fast computational algorithm and convolution theorem for the Discrete Cosine Transform, the Combined Symbol Matching algorithm for facsimile coding, and Scene Adaptive Coding for video coding; and Bernard Marti, Director of Standards for France Telecom, for his leadership in international telecommunication research, development and standardization, including promoting key multimedia standardization projects, such as JPEG and MPEG. In addition, Mr. Marti has successfully served for many years as Vice Chairman of the CCITT SGVIII and later as Chair of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2.

"We look at the person, their contributions, and the impact of those contributions on the industry," explained Dr. Istvan Sebestyen, IMTC President and Chief Engineer and Director of Multimedia and Applications Standards, Siemens AG, Germany. "The IMTC is pleased to recognize the extraordinary caliber of these individuals who have significantly influenced our industry, especially in multimedia research, development, standardization, education and management."

Along with Leadership Awards, the IMTC presented Service Awards to Nori Sayanagi of Start Lab, Inc. (a joint venture of Sony Corporation and Taiyo Yuden Col, Ltd.), and posthumously to Mark Ludwig, formerly of Polycom. "Nori and Mark achieved this distinction through their individual and combined efforts in support of the IMTC Charter."

About the International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC)

The IMTC is an industry-leading, non-profit organization whose mission is to promote and facilitate the development and use of interoperable, real-time, multimedia telecommunication products and services based on open international standards. The IMTC hosts interoperability testing events and demonstrations throughout the world. Over the past three years the IMTC has hosted more than 20 such events to test H.323, 3G-324M, 3G-PSS, SIP, Nat/Firewall Traversal, T.120, H.320, and Voice over IP products and services with each other. The IMTC Board of Directors includes representatives from Cisco Systems, Dilithium Networks, Emblaze Mobile, France Telecom, LifeSize Communications, Nextreaming Corp., NMS Communications, Nokia, Nortel Networks, Polycom, RADVISION, Siemens AG, Sony, and TANDBERG. The San Ramon, California-based consortium comprises approximately 70 member organizations from around the globe. Membership is open to any interested party, including vendors of audio, document, and video conferencing hardware and software; academic institutions; government agencies; and non-profit organizations. "The IMTC is making Rich Media happen Anywhere, Anytime." Further information on IMTC can be found at http://www.imtc.org.