PRATT, William K. 1937-

PERSONAL: Born June 24, 1937, in Kankakee, IL; son of Kenneth Alvin and Helen Louise Pratt; married; wife's name Barbara (marriage ended); married; second wife's name Rochelle S.; children: Kathleen Ann, Carolyn Lee Pratt Konecki, Christine Maree Pratt Jorgenson, Michael Thomas. Ethnicity: "White." Education: Bradley University, B.S., 1959; University of Southern California, M.S.E.E., 1961, Ph.D., 1965. Politics: Republican. Religion: Roman Catholic.

ADDRESSES: Home—8 Almendra Lane, Los Altos, CA 94022. Office—Photon Dynamics, Inc., 17 Great Oaks Blvd., San Jose, CA 95119; fax: 650-948-5757. E-mail—pratt@pixelsoft.com.

CAREER: Hughes Aircraft Co., member of technical staff, 1959-65; University of Southern California, Los Angeles, professor of electrical engineering, 1965-79, and founder and director of Image Processing Institute; Compression Labs, Inc., senior vice president, 1979-81; Vicom Systems, Inc., founder, chair, chief executive officer, and chief technical officer, 1981-88; Sun Microsystems, Inc., director of multimedia and imaging technology, 1988-94; Pixelsoft, Inc., founder and president, 1993—. Photon Dynamics, Inc., chief technical officer, 1996—; Image Enhancement Systems, Inc., member of technology advisory board, 1997; holder of patents for television coder, computer simulator, facsimile coder, image coder, twodimensional convolution processor, and flat-panel defect detector; consultant to numerous corporations, including Aerojet-General, Bendix, Ford Aerospace, International Business Machines Corp., and Silicon Graphics. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, visiting assistant professor, 1969; University of Paris, visiting scientist and visiting professor, 1977-78.

MEMBER: Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (senior member).

AWARDS, HONORS: Guggenheim fellow in France, 1977; named Albert Rose Electronic Imager of the Year, 1988.

WRITINGS:

Laser Communication Systems, Wiley Publishing Group (New York, NY), 1969.

Digital Image Processing, Wiley Publishing Group (New York, NY), 1969, 3rd edition, 2001.

(Editor) Image Transmission Techniques, Academic Press (New York, NY), 1979.

(Editor with Ronald B. Arps) Image Processing and Interchange: Implementation and Systems (conference proceedings), Society for Imaging Science and Technology (Bellingham, WA), 1992.

PIKS Foundation C Programmer's Guide, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1995.

XIL: An Imaging Foundation Library, Manning Publications (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1996.

Contributor to books, including Computer Techniques in Image Processing, Academic Press (New York, NY), 1970; contributor of numerous articles to periodicals.

SIDELIGHTS: William K. Pratt told CA: "I have worked in two technological areas: laser communications and digital image processing. In the field of laser communications, I developed the basic concepts of laser modulation and detection processes. I was responsible for the discovery of the transform image coding concept, which is the basis of the JPEG and MPEG image coding standards. I also invented a facsimile coding system and a means of high-speed image convolution.

"I am the chief technology officer for software at Photon Dynamics, Inc., a leading supplier of image processing equipment for industrial inspection applications in the display industry. I am also the founder of PixelSoft, Inc., which has developed and marketed image processing software based upon the International Standards Organization Programmer's Imaging Kernel System (PIKS) application program interface."