Dr István Sebestyén retires after 12 years of successful service in the office
Geneva, 26 August 2019
Dr István Sebestyén, Secretary General of Ecma International, has retired after 12 years of successful service in the office. Throughout his long and storied career, Dr István Sebestyén has been dedicated to the standardization of multimedia and other ICT technologies, from still image and video codecs to transport and applications. He was a founding member of JPEG, JBIG and MPEG, the groups that brought us the well-known image and video compression standards that have laid the foundations for the entire digital content distribution industry, from cable and satellite to Internet streaming. Dr István Sebestyén held several leadership positions in CCITT’s Study Group 8 (CCITT became ITU-T in 1993), ITU-T Study Group 16, IMTC, DIN and SNV.
“István’s contributions to the success of Ecma International have been outstanding. István successfully strengthened Ecma International as one of the most relevant and most effective SDOs. He also strengthened the global outreach and impact of Ecma. And István led the transformation of Ecma towards embracing new ways of working. The collaboration with open source in the context of JavaScript has been pioneering and opened the way for more such projects in Ecma as well as has played as a role model for other SDOs,” said Dr Jochen Friedrich of IBM, President of Ecma International.
Patrick Luthi, Chief Technical Officer of Ecma International and long-time standardization expert, became his successor. Patrick Luthi was appointed at the December 2018 General Assembly of Ecma International in Boston as the next Secretary General and took office on 1 August 2019.
Prior to joining Ecma as CTO in June 2015, Patrick Luthi was manager of technology standards at Cisco, and a member of the Office of the CTO in the Collaboration Technology Group. He joined Cisco through the acquisition of Tandberg in 2010 and was working for Tandberg since 2002. Before that he worked for PictureTel, the quondam world leader in videoconferencing communication, where he held several R&D positions. Patrick Luthi also served as Vice President, Chairman of several Working Groups and as member of the Board of Directors of the International Multimedia Telecommunication Consortium (IMTC) for more than a decade. He authored IETF proposed standard RTP Payload Format for ITU-T G.722.1 (RFC 5577 and 3047) and RTP Payload Format for H.264 RCDO Video (RFC 6185). Since 2000, he has been the Rapporteur for the ITU-T multimedia systems, terminals, gateways and data conferencing Experts group (Q11/16), and the Editor of the H.320 series, H.233, H.234, H.243 and other ITU-T Recommendations.
Patrick Luthi is also a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a Fellow of the International Multimedia Telecommunication Consortium (IMTC).
Looking ahead, Dr Jochen Friedrich said, “We are looking forward with great enthusiasm to have Patrick, who has been Ecma’s CTO since 2015, playing this important role in the Ecma office and continuing the successful path Ecma has taken.”
For more information: please contact Patrick Luthi, Secretary General of Ecma International at media@ecma-international.org.