IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CAS) presented the 2021 IEEE CAS Mac Van Valkenburg Award to Professor WU Feng from the University of Science and Technology of China for his “contributions in multimedia non-uniform coding and communications” on May 24, 2021. This is the first time that the prestigious Award is presented to a scholar from Chinese Mainland.

The IEEE CAS Mac Van Valkenburg Award was first presented in 1985. Mac Van Valkenburg Award is the highest technical honor of IEEE CAS, and is presented to only one scholar per year usually.

Prof. WU Feng is an expert in the field of media streaming. He has conducted research on theory, key technologies, standardization, and industrial applications of media streaming for more than 20 years. He established the non-uniform rate-distortion theory for multimedia, solved several key technical problems of efficient media compression and adaptive media transmission, and promoted the development in the field of media streaming in China. He has authored 2 books, more than 180 journal papers, and has been granted more than 150 patents.

WU’s technical proposals have been adopted into MPEG-4, H.264, H.265, among other international video compression standards. He is the chair of the IEEE Data Compression Standard Committee. His contributions made our nation achieve important breakthrough in the competition of international video coding standards. He led the development of a real-time H.264 codec, which was adopted as a component of the Windows 7 media kit that represented the state of the art and was installed more than 450 million times. He developed the first H.265 media streaming system based on 4G (LTE), and the H.265 hardware codec later. The H.265 hardware codec has been adopted into smartphones, and the chip shipment volume reaches 100 million. His developed technologies are also widely used in industrial products/services such as Tencent Meeting.

(Edited by LU Hongyu, USTC News Center)