Gary Sullivan (engineer)

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Gary J. Sullivan is an American electrical engineer who led the development of the H.264/AVC video coding standard and created the DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) API/DDI video decoding feature of the Microsoft Windows operating system platform. He was the chairmen of the (Joint Video Team (JVT)) standardization committee that developed the H.264/AVC standard, and he edited large portions of it. He also chaired and contributed to a number of other video-related standardization projects such as extensions of ITU-T H.263.

Sullivan received B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Louisville J.B. Speed School of Engineering, Kentucky, in 1982 and 1983, respectively. He received Ph.D. and Engineer degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1991. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Sullivan is the rapporteur/chairman of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG), a co-chairman of the video part of the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), and a co-chairman of the Joint Video Team (JVT), which is a joint project between the VCEG and MPEG organizations. He has led ITU-T VCEG (ITU-T Q.6/SG16) since 1996 and is also the ITU-T video liaison representative to MPEG and JPEG. In MPEG (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11), in addition to his current service as a co-chair of its video work, he also served as the chairman of MPEG video from March 2001 to May 2002. In the JVT he was the JVT chairman for the development of the next generation H.264/AVC video coding standard and its fidelity-range extensions (FRExt), and was a co-chairman for the development of the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extensions.

He received the Technical Achievement award of the International Committee on Technology Standards (INCITS) in 2005 for his work on H.264/AVC and other video standardization topics. In July of 2006, the video coding work of the ITU-T led by Sullivan for the preceding ten years was voted as the most influential area of the standardization work of the CCITT and ITU-T in their 50-year history.

Sullivan holds the position of Video Architect in the Core Media Processing Team of the Entertainment and Devices Division of Microsoft Corporation. At Microsoft he also designed and remains lead engineer for the DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) API/DDI video decoding feature of the Microsoft Windows operating system platform. His DXVA designs include decoding acceleration schemes for H.261, MPEG-1, H.262/MPEG-2, H.263, MPEG-4 Part 2, H.264/AVC, Windows Media Video versions 8 and 9, and VC-1.

Prior to joining Microsoft in 1999, he was the manager of communications core research at PictureTel Corporation, the quondam world leader in videoconferencing communication. He was previously a Howard Hughes Fellow and member of technical staff in the Advanced Systems Division of Hughes Aircraft Corporation, and a terrain-following radar system software engineer for Texas Instruments.