GREGORY S. YOVANOF - Associate Professor

CONTACT INFO

SUMMARY OF QUALIFIACATIONS

Over twenty-year R&D and Business Development experience in the areas of: Design of communication systems and Production of multimedia ASIC chips. Areas of expertise: Broadband wireless communications; Design of multimedia systems; Applications of information theory. Technical management in the area of multimedia chip development and manufacturing; involved in all stages of a product life cycle – product definition, algorithm development and hardware design, foundry relationships, wafer testing, system integration and customer support. Business Development experience with hi-tech companies from the greater Pacific Rim region. Exposed to the structured environment of a big corporation as well as the dynamism of a startup. Member of an executive team that succeeded in raising VC funds to launch a company in Silicon Valley. Head of the Broadband Wireless and Sensor Networks R&D group at AIT and the Academic Director of a Master’s level program in the Management of Innovation.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

• (Oct ’02 – ) Athens Information Technology www.ait.gr, Athens, Greece. Associate Professor:
• Head of the “Broadband Wireless and Sensor Networks Group”, http://www.ait.edu.gr/research/Wireless_and_Sensors/overview.asp. Managed funded R&D activities in broadband access networks, clustered ad-hoc and wireless mesh networks, .
• Has co-designed and currently serves as the Academic Manager of a novel Master’s level program in the “Management of Business, Innovation and Technology”. A Lecturer of the joint Harvard University, JFK School of Government and AIT executive seminar on “Managing and Shaping Change in the Information Age”.
• (Mar.’00-Aug.‘01) Bitmath Inc., Fremont, CA (Vice President, New Business & Research): Responsible for: growing the technology portfolio and expanding the company’s scope to enter the broadband and optical communications markets. Negotiated and closed four multiyear, multimillion dollar deals involving licensing IP core technology and co-developing and marketing ASIC chips - three in the area of hardware development for the DVD market, and one in the high-growth area of optical networks. Head of a team that developed PHY level Forward Error Correction (FEC) technology for the optical network market – Reed-Solomon and BCH codes.
• (Jan.‘97-Feb.‘00) Cyclonics Inc., Fremont, CA (VP of Business Development): Joined Cyclonics when it started (Jan ’97), as the Director of Multimedia to lead a multinational team developing ICs for the DVD market. In charge of the development of a DVD-data controller chip (Demodulation, Error-Correction, DVD Navigation, embedded CPU). This chip reached mass-market production volume and gained several market awards for its performance; it was used by AKAI in the award-winning DV-P4000 DVD-player. Promoted to VP of Business Development in Sep. ’99. and planned Cyclonics’ expansion into the area of Broadband Communications (Digital-TV, cable data modem, 3G wireless).
• (Feb.’92 -Jan.‘97) Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA (Staff Scientist): R&D in multimedia processing as applied to computer peripherals (printers, scanners, MFPs, digital cameras). Expert in hardcopy imaging, image and video compression. Contributions to the ISO-JPEG standards committee. Key contributor to the FlashPix imaging format (a joint HP, Kodak, Microsoft, Live-Picture project). Co-designed the imaging system of the first HP digital camera. Worked in the areas of MPEG video coding, non-linear image filtering, wavelet compression, JBIG/JPEG hardware.
• (Sep.’89-Jan.’92) Eastman Kodak Co.- Kodak Berkeley Research/KBR, (Member of Technical Staff). Analysis, design and development of high performance communication systems. Contributed to the design of a fast LZ, lossless compression chip and the design and prototyping of a novel high-speed optical archival system. Managed a $350K basic research project in the area of color image compression.
• (Aug.’88-Sep.’89) Cyclotomics A Kodak Company (Later became KBR). (Research Scientist): Responsible for the expansion of Cyclotomics scope into the data compression area. Designed & implemented compression software packages.
• (Aug.82-Aug.88) University of Southern California (USC). EE-Dept. (Research Assistant): Engaged in research in the areas of synchronization and sequence design for spread-spectrum, Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) networks.

EDUCATION

Ph.D. in Communications, Electrical Engineering-Systems, University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, CA, 1988. M.Sc. in Signal Processing, Electrical Engineering-Systems, University of Southern California, 1984. Diploma in Electrical Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece, 1982.

Patents

• G.S. Yovanof, A. Drukarev, "Fixed-Rate JPEG Still Image Compression,"
  European Patent 96306012.4-1241, US Patent 5,677,689, Oct. 14, 1997. http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5677689.html

• K. Konstantinides, B. Natarajan, G.S. Yovanof, "Method of filtering images using image compressibility to determine threshold parameter”,
  US Patent 5,787,209 (July 28, 1998), and US Patent 6,016,366 (Jan 18, 2000).

Recently Funded R&D Projects

• MAGNET-Beyond IST 027396, 04/06-06/08 (Intracom Telecom, S.A., sub-contract C02/06/0090): Research and investigation of PHY/MAC Cross-Layer Optimized schemes for High-data-Rate Personal Area Networks.
• WINSOC IST 033914, 09/06-12/08 (Intracom Telecom, S.A., sub-contract): Research and development of Cross-layer optimized sensor networking algorithms and HW architectures for environmental risk management.
•  BROADWAY IST 2001-32686 (INTRACOM S.A. sub-contract, 10/03-12/04): MAC Layer Security mechanisms for Clustered Ad-Hoc Networks.
• ROMANTIK IST 2001-32549 (INTRACOM S.A. sub-contract, 10/03-12/04): Opportunity Driven Multiple Access (ODMA) Schemes for Multi-hop Ad-hoc networks.

Journal Publications

Click here to see the Publications
 

Areas of Technical Interest

4G Broadband Communications Systems, Ad-Hoc and Sensor networks, Multimedia Processing & Coding, Consumer Electronics, Optical Storage.

Professional Activities

• Reviewer: IEEE Trans. On Information Theory & Signal Processing Society, IEE Computers & Digital Techniques, J. Visual Comm. & Image Presentation; and, a number of Conferences, such as: IEEE GLOBECOM, ICC,
• Member of Technical Program Committee (TPC): ICC’06, MASS’05, ITCC’05, IWWAN’04-’06, IWUWB’03-04 & ICU’05, Pervasive Systems 2006 (PerSys'06), IASTED CSN’05-’06 & WNET’05-’06,
• Member of the Organizing Committee: CrownCom 2006, AccessNets 2006.
  Chaired the “System Components III”, Session-20 at the ICU2005 Workshop, Sep 7, 2005 ETH, Zurich; "Motion Picture Coding" session in the 27th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems & Computers, Pacific Grove, CA, Nov. 1993.
• Listed in the Marquis Who’s Who in Science & Engineering,
  the Marquis Who’s Who in the World, and Lexington’s Who’s Who.

Professional memberships

Senior Member of IEEE (Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers).
Member of the Technical Chamber of Greece.

Languages

Citizenship