SMPTE to Honor Technical Excellence

This year's SMPTE award winners will be honored during a ceremony on Thursday, Oct. 21 during the SMPTE Technical Conference and Exhibition in Pasadena, Calif.

The Progress Model goes to Kees Schouhamer Immink, president and founder of Turing Machines. Immink has developed coding technology for CD, DVD, the BluRay disc system and more.

The winner of the James A. Leitch Gold Medal Awards is SMPTE Fellow Hugo Gaggioni, vice president and chief technology office (CTO) of the broadcast and production systems division of Sony for his research and work in digital video and image processing, information theory, video/audio compression and multidimensional signal processing.

This year's recipient of the Eastman Kodak Gold Medal Award goes to Dr. Roderick T. Ryan, who started his photography career WWII when he photographed the atomic bombs tests at Bikini Atoll.

Father and son team Ed and Steve Sabol won the John Grierson Gold Medal Award for technical achievements in documentary motion picture film and technology of documentary film production.

The Fuji Gold Medal Wards goes to Nelson Tyler, founder, owner and CEO Tyler Camera Systems. This award recognizes engineering achievements in the design and development of photographic or electronics image origination techniques.

The winners of the Journal Award are Roger R. A. Morton, Michelle Maurer and Christopher DuMont for their papers, "An Introduction to Aliasing and Sharpening Digital Motion Picture Systems" and "Relationships between Pixel Count, Aliasing and Limiting Resolution in Digital Motion Pictures Systems."

The American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) won the Presidential Proclamation for maintaining an outstanding status and reputation in the motion picture and television industries worldwide.

This year's recipient of the David Sarnoff Medal Award goes to Stephen W. Long, technical executive, InnoVision Directorate, within the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGAI/TX).

The Technicolor/Herbert T. Kalmus Gold Medal Award goes to Richard J. Goldberg, president and CEO of Richard J. Goldberg & Co.

The winner of the Samuel L. Warner Memorial Medal Award goes to Tom McCormick, president and founder of NT Audio Video Film Labs.

The winners of the Citation for Outstanding Service to the Society are James William Edwards, II, Brad Fortner, Raymond N. H. Lai and Steve C. Tadzynski.

This year's recipients of the Lou Wolf Memorial Scholarship are Scott David Gerber of NYU and John Francis Lucido of the University of North Carolina, at Greensboro.

SMPTE will also honor 16 new Fellows at the Honors and Awards Ceremony.

* Wendy Aylsworth, vice president of technology, Warner Brothers Technical Operations
* Charles Dages, executive vice president, Warner Brothers Technical Operations
* Preston A. Davis, president of broadcast, ABC
* Michael A. Dolan, president of Television Broadcast Technology
* James W. Edwards II, senior video applications engineer at Tektronix
* Susan Gwynn-Handley, a 25-year veteran at Kodak
* David Keighley, president of DKP 70MM, an IMAX company
* Phillip Livingston, vice president of technical liaison, Panasonic
* Richard Mizer, cofounder and CTO of Cin Events
* Marty Ollstein, president of Crystal Image
* Robert Plummer, senior director of advanced technology at DirecTV
* Thomas Scott, cofounder, vice president of engineering and CTO of Entertainment Digital Network.
* John D. Silva, previously senior account executives at Hoffman Video Systems before going on sabbatical to study digital technology
* Charles S. Swartz, executive director and CEO of the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California
* Frederick Van Roessel, who has received 17 patents for his work in broadcast color camera development.
* David Wiswell, group manager for Advanced Television Products at Panasonic Broadcast & Television Co.

The SMPTE Technical Conference and Exhibition takes place in Pasadena, Calif, Oct. 20-23. For more information, visit the SMPTE Web site at http://www.smpte.org.