Karlheinz Brandenburg received M.S. (Diplom) degrees in Electrical Engineering and in Mathematics from Erlangen University in 1980 and 1982, respectively. In 1989 he earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, also from Erlangen University, for work on digital audio coding and perceptual measurement techniques. The techniques described in his thesis form the basis of MPEG Layer-3 (mp3), MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding and most other modern audio compression schemes.
From 1989 to 1990 he was with AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ, USA. He worked on the ASPEC perceptual coding technique and on the definition of the ISO/IEC MPEG Layer-3 system. In 1990 he returned to Erlangen University to continue the research on audio coding and to teach a course on digital audio technology. In 1993 he became head of the Audio/Multimedia department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (FhG-IIS). Since 2000, he is teaching at Ilmenau Technical University and became the director of the new Fraunhofer Group for Electronic Media Technologies in Ilmenau, Germany.
He has presented numerous papers at AES conventions and other international conferences. Together with Mark Kahrs, he edited the book "Applications of Digital Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics".
In 1994 he received the AES Fellowship Award for his work on perceptual audio coding and pscychoacoustics. In 1998 he received the AES silver medal award for his continued contributions and leadership to the art and science of perceptual audio coding. In 2000, he received the AES Board of Governors Award for his cochairmanship of the AES 17th. International Conference, the first scientific international conference dedicated to the topic of high quality audio coding.
Dr. Brandenburg is a member of the technical committee on Audio and Electroacoustics of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He has worked within the MPEG-Audio committee since its beginnings in 1988. In recent years, he worked on MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding (standardized in 1997) and helped to organize the work for MPEG-4 Audio. He is a member of SDMI (the Secure Digital Music Initiative) and is chairing the AES Standards Committee working group AESSC-06-04 on Internet Audio Delivery Systems.
Dr. Brandenburg has been granted 25 patents and has several more pending.
Bob then worked at White-Weld and Company in their computer
research division, which later became Interactive Data Corporation, in
various roles doing systems design and implementation. White-Weld was one
of the earliest financial information services and used the Scientific
Data Systems 940 to provide time-sharing services. Later, at IDC, developed
tools on their own
version of IBM's VM system. These projects included an
interactive debugger and a VM-based mail system (predating Profs).
He consulted for ECD corporation in 1977 and developed a very extended Basic for their multiprocessor 6502-based system.In 1979 he founded Software Arts in 1979 with Dan Bricklin to develop and sell VisiCalc. VisiCalc was the first electronic spreadsheet program and remained a widely used program for personal computers for many years.
Bob joined Lotus Development in 1985, where he created the Lotus Express product and a Fax facility for Lotus Notes. In 1990 he joined Slate Corporation, working on mobile and pen-based systems. Slate focused on pen-based and mobile computing.
And in 1993 Bob started work with Microsoft Corporation, where he focused on the consumer use of computers, in particular, home networking, and the idea of "No New Wires Networking" and "IP Everywhere" with phone wire networking being one result.
Since 1998 he has been on his own pursuing a number of projects among them, trying to explain the larger concepts of IP Everywhere
Bob has been awarded numerous industry honours, including:
MIT William L Stewart Award for co-founding the Student
Information Processing Board.
ACM
Fellow
ACM Software System
Award
PC Magazine Lifetime
Achievement Award
Esquire Magazine, The Best of the New Generation
Computer Bowl MVP
MIT LCS Industrial Achievement Award
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