Arun N. Netravali

Arun N. Netravali

Arun N. Netravali is Director of the Computing Systems Research and Technology Conversion Laboratories at AT&T Bell Laboratories, with responsibility for research in VLSI design aids and architectures, communication networks, distributed computing, programming languages, interactive systems and high definition television (HDTV). He joined Bell Laboratories in 1972 as a Member of Technical Staff; became Head of the Visual Communications Research Department in 1978, and assumed his current position in 1983 with added responsibility for HDTV in 1990. He was at NASA from 1970 to 1972, where he worked on problems related to filtering, guidance, and control for the space shuttle.

He has been an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1984, and has taught graduate courses at City College, Columbia University, and Rutgers University. He served on the editorial board of the Proceedings of the IEEE from 1980 to 1984, and is currently an editor of several journals. He has served on the Digital Television Committees of the IEEE and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. He is an advisor to the Center for Telecommunications Research of Columbia University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. He has organized and chaired sessions at several technical conferences, and was the program chairman of the 1981 Picture Coding Symposium and the 1990 International Conference on Pattern Recognition. He has edited several special issues for the IEEE, including two for the Proceedings on Digital Encoding of Graphics, and Visual Communication Systems, and one for the Transactions on Picture Communication Systems.

Dr. Netravali received the B. Tech (Honors) degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, in 1967 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Rice University, Houston, Texas in 1969 and 1970, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering.

Dr. Netravali is a member of the Thu Beta Pi and Sigma Xi. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is the author of more than 100 papers and holds over fifty patents in the areas of Computer Networks, Human Interfaces to Machines, Picture Processing, and Digital Television. He is the co-author of two books: Digital Picture Representation and Compression (Plenum, 1987), and Visual Communication Systems (IEEE Press, 1989). He received the Donald G. Fink Award for the best review paper published in the Proceedings of the IEEE in 1980, the journal award for the best paper from the Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers in 1982, the L.G. Abraham Award for the best paper by the IEEE Communications Society in 1985.

He is an avid tennis player, and has won several local championships. He is married to Chitra Netravali, a pediatrician, and has two children.

He is co-recipient of the 1991 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, along with C. Chapin Cutler and John O. Limb, 'For the invention and development of predictive coding pictures and picture sequences.'