Researcher Named One of World's Top 100 Young Innovators by MIT's Technology Review

John Apostolopoulos, a senior research scientist in HP Labs' Streaming Media Systems project, has been named one of the world's top young innovators for his work in multimedia communication.

The TR100, chosen by MIT's Technology Review and an elite panel of judges, consists of 100 innovators under age 35 whose work in technology promises to have a profound impact on the world. Nominees are recognized for their contribution in transforming the nature of technology in such industries as medicine, computing and telecommunications.

Apostolopoulos, who was part of the team that received a Technical Emmy award for creating the U.S. Digital TV standard, is the second consecutive Young Innovator from HP Labs. Susie Wee, now manager of the Multimedia Communications & Networking Department, was similarly honored last year, also for work in streaming media.

"This is a strong validation of the importance of John's work to the field," said Dick Lampman, senior vice president of research at HP and director, HP Labs. "He's repeatedly demonstrated his leadership as a true innovator."

Apostolopoulos's recent research has focused on improving the reliability, fidelity and security of video streaming over the Internet. Because the Internet is vulnerable to errors or attacks that can interrupt video streams, Apostolopoulos designed a technique for intelligently sending video data packets across multiple paths simultaneously rather than relying on a single path. Even if one path is interrupted, the transmission continues because the missing video can be recovered from the data sent along the other path. .

Apostolopoulos is now turning his attention to streaming video over wireless networks, including the popular 802.11 (WiFi) wireless LANs.

Before joining HP Labs in 1997, Apostolopoulos was a part of a pioneering team in high-definition television at MIT. While a graduate student at MIT, he helped create the video compression system that was integrated into the U.S. Digital TV standard for high-definition television, for which the team received a Technical Emmy in 1997.

In 2001, he received the Visual Communications and Image Processing (VCIP) Young Investigator Best Paper Award. The paper, "Reliable Video Communication Over Lossy Packet Networks using Multiple State Encoding and Path Diversity," is available as HP Labs Technical Report HPL-2001-319.

In addition to his work at HP Labs, Apostolopoulos teaches and conducts joint research at Stanford, where he is a Consulting Assistant Professor in Electrical Engineering.