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 strategies for custom VLSI layout, a complete industrial strength color management system (leveraged on research by Mik Lamming, 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 actual 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 professional distributed color printing), evaluated acquisition targets, and worried about the NeXT investment.

Since 1994 he has been with the Laboratories at Hewlett-Packard, where he contributed to the color fax and digital sender products, pen test engineering, pre-press systems, commercial printing, scalable video for MPEG-21, and variable data printing solutions for small and medium businesses, specifically security printing. He currently works on GPU-Accelerated RIP for EPID Printing and Advanced Color Processing.

His skills as a speculative designer have 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. He has been 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 has been 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 has been teaching successful short courses on Color Imaging on the Internet IS&T and SPIE conferences. He has given numerous presentations in Austria, Canada, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Switzerland, and the USA.

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

Currently he fulfills leadership roles and participates in governance bodies for governmental entities and professional societies in Italy, Japan, Switzerland and the U.S.A. In these bodies he promotes scientific excellence in areas of major strategic importance for the future of research, economy and society. He devotes 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, and SPIE Fellow Award in 2002. Erdös number: 4, via Amnon Barak, Franco Preparata, Jürg Nievergelt.