Giordano Beretta

Giordano Bruno Beretta received his doctorate in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich, in 1984 and joined Xerox PARC that year. For his pioneering work in color imaging he received the 1989 Xerox Corporate Research Group Achievement Award. This work included color visualization algorithms for custom VLSI layout, a complete industrial strength color management system (leveraged on research by Mik Lamming, Warren "Dusty" Rhodes, Maureen Stone, and Doug Wyatt) that was incorporated in products sold to the federal government (collaboration with Tim Diebert), and a suite of color selection tools that allowed non-experts to design color palettes of high esthetical quality (these tools were used by industrial designers for Xerox products).

In 1990 he moved on to Canon, where he was involved mainly in strategic planning and intellectual property management, while exercising his technical skills as Canon's Technical Advisor for Color. Under the motto "quality color for the masses" he was instrumental for Canon's venture in low-cost color bubble jet printing, color scanning, and digital video (with Peter Schnorf). He led the Patent Committee (yielding among others a portfolio of patents crucial for commercial distributed color printing), evaluated acquisition targets, and worried about the NeXT investment.

From 1994 he has been with the Laboratories at Hewlett-Packard, where under the sequential guidance of several eminent supervisors he contributed to myriad projects, mostly related to color imaging or printing. He currently works on GPU-RIP for I-Jong Lin and John Ludd Recker in the Print Production Automation Laboratory led by Gary Dispoto.

In the past, his skills as a speculative designer had translated into a number of patents and articles in numerical mathematics, human-computer interaction, computational geometry, design automation tools, color science, and image communication & encoding. In the mid-1990s he was a thought leader in developing a common understanding of the Internet's impact on publishing, which led to Digital Publishing. More recently, at EI 2001, with Neil Gunther he was instrumental in developing a benchmarking methodology for contents based image retrieval (CBIR) algorithms over the Internet. In addition to courses on color science and MPEG-21, in collaboration with Robert Buckley he was teaching successful short courses on Color Imaging on the Internet at IS&T and SPIE conferences. He gave numerous presentations in Australia, Austria, Canada, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Switzerland, and the USA.

A strong believer in the social role of synergies and emergent properties, he was a tireless promoter of young scientists and engineers, helping them in their first professional steps. He had organized successful sessions on color science (NIP in Yokohama and Hilton Head), conferences on color and Internet imaging (EI in San Jose and Europto in Zürich), and co-chaired the EI 2000 (with John J. McCann) and EI 2004 (with Robert L. Stevenson) symposia.

Recently he had fulfilled leadership roles and had participated in governance bodies for governmental entities and professional societies in Italy, Japan, Switzerland and the U.S.A. In these bodies he had promoted scientific excellence in areas of major strategic importance for the future of research, economy and society. He had devoted particular attention to ethical behavior and the advancement of women in research.

Giordano Beretta is a member of AAAS, IS&T, ISCC, SMS, SPIE, and recipient of the IS&T Service Award in 1998, IS&T Senior Membership Award in 2000, IS&T Fellow Award in 2001, SPIE Fellow Award in 2002, and Raymond C. Bowman Award in 2009. His Erdös number is 4, via Amnon Barak, Franco Preparata, Jürg Nievergelt; Dirac number: 3, via Christie Jayaratnam Eliezer, Neil J. Gunther.