Advisory Board

Dr. Michelle Blank, Chief Marketing Officer, Radware Ltd. Dr. Blank is a veteran marketing executive in the communication domain. Prior to Radware, Dr. Blank has held executive leadership positions include President and VP of Marketing for RADVISION. As an advisor to Vidyo, the company will leverage her expertise building businesses around commercializing innovative new technologies. Dr. Blank has a track record of building strong strategic partnerships between innovative young companies and industry giants such as Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, Nortel, Oracle, and Polycom. She excels in assessing market dynamics and technology trends and is highly skilled in carving out market leadership positions for companies and products in intensely dynamic, competitive and emerging markets.

M. Reha Civanlar, currently a visiting professor at Koç University, Istanbul, was formerly head of Visual Communications Research at AT&T Labs - Research. Dr. Civanlar is an IEEE fellow recognized for his contributions to video transport over communications networks, and a pioneer in scalable video coding. He holds 23 video patents and more than hundred publications. He received his B.S., M.S. from Middle East Tech. Univ., Turkey, and Ph.D. from NCSU, all in EE. From 1984 to 1987, he was a researcher in the Center for Comm. and Signal Proc. where he worked on image restoration, coding and communications systems. In 1988, he joined Pixel Machines in Bell Labs, working on parallel architectures for image and video processing. He joined Visual Comm. Research Dept. in 1991, and became a department head in 1999. The department has been an active contributor to all international video coding and transport standards since the beginning. Dr. Civanlar is recipient of the ASSP Senior Award in 1995. He served on the editorial boards of IEEE Trans.on Comm. and Trans. on Multimedia, and JASP, and as a member of IMDSP and MMSP technical committees of the IEEE. He joined newly established Computer Engineerimng Department of Koç University in 2002. His current interests include networked video and multimedia with particular emphasis on the Internet applications and video coding.

Alon Cohen, Co-founder & CEO of RemoteAbility, Co-founder of VocalTec. Mr. Cohen is a VoIP veteran with a track record of success in bringing leading edge technologies to market. Mr. Cohen holds 4 US patents for communication technologies and was awarded the "VoIP Visionary Award" by PulverMedia. At VocalTec, Mr. Cohen designed and patented the "Audio Transceiver" which served as the foundation for transferring voice over the Internet. Using this patented technology, Mr. Cohen spearheaded the global standardization initiative of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). As a board member and part of VocalTec's management team, Mr. Cohen took VocalTec through its IPO.

Michael J. Horowitz, Managing Partner at Applied Video Compression a video compression system design consulting company. Prior to founding Applied Video Compression, Dr. Horowitz was Technical Director, Video Algorithms at CoVi Technologies where his team designed and developed high definition image processing pipelines and compression architectures for digital video surveillance applications and Polycom where he led a team that developed one of the first commercially available real-time H.264 | MPEG-4 AVC video codecs for the VSX line of video conferencing products. In addition, he is the inventor of the Polycom Video Error Concealment algorithm and co-inventor of the H.264 Flexible Macroblock Order (FMO) technique. Dr. Horowitz has 16 patents and patents pending and has authored more than 40 publications. He received the A.B. degree (with distinction) in physics from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in 1986 and the Ph.D. in electrical engineering from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1998. Dr. Horowitz has served as chair of the ad-hoc group for H.264 complexity reduction and the ad-hoc group for error resilience in both the ITU-T’s Video Coding Experts Group and the Joint Video Team and regularly contributes to those standards committees. His interests include early image pipeline processing of digital video and video error concealment for ultra-low delay transmission of compressed video over lossy channels.

Professor Henning Schulzrinne is currently chairman of the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, New York. Professor Schulzrinne received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts. Prior to joining Columbia University, he was a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill and an associate department head at GMD-Fokus (Berlin). Protocols co-developed by Professor Schulzrinne include RTP, RTSP and SIP, and are now Internet standards used in almost all Internet telephony and multimedia applications. His research interests include Internet multimedia systems, ubiquitous computing, mobile systems, quality of service, and performance evaluation. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Thomas Wiegand, Editor of the H.264/MPEG4-AVC video coding standard and its extension SVC and Associate Chair of VCEG, JVT, and MPEG Video. Mr. Wiegand is a world renowned expert in video communications with over 250 publications and standard contributions and 20 Patents. Currently he is the head of the Image Communication Group in the Image Processing Department of the Heinrich Hertz Institute Berlin, Germany. He received the Dr.-Ing. degree from University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, in 2000 and the Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, Germany, in 1995. From 1993 to 1994, he was a Visiting Researcher at Kobe University, Japan. In 1995, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA, where he started his research on video compression and transmission. From 1997 to 1998, he was a Visiting Researcher at Stanford University, CA, USA and served as a consultant to 8x8, Inc., Santa Clara, CA, USA.