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Leonardo Chiariglione is an italian engineer, born in Almese( in the province of Turin, in Piedmont). 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. Leonardo 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 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 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/WG12), 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. Indeed, MPEG has had such impact on audio-visual technology that an Emmy Engineering Award was given in 1996 to ISO/IEC for the work on the MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and JPEG standards. Dr. Hiroshi Yasuda, Chairman of ISO/IEC Subcommittee 29, accepted the Emmy on behalf of all who participated in the development of these standards. MPEG-4 has been published in 2002. MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 are presently under development.

Leonardo has received a number of international awards, including: 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 secure digital music delivery technology.^[1]

Leonardo was appointed as Distinguished Invited Professor at Information and Communication University, Daejeon, Korea in 2004.

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

• Rosenblatt, Bill. "MPEG founder Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione launches Digital Media Project", DRM Watch, September 3, 2003.
• Home Page of Leonardo Chiariglione
• Chiariglione and the birth of MPEG (IEEE Spectrum September 1997 Volume 34 Number 9)
• An interview with Leonardo Chiariglione (IEEE Spectrum January 2000 Volume 37 Number 1