Michael J. Horowitz (born January 2, 1964 in Ames, Iowa) is an American electrical engineer who actively participated in the creation of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and H.265/HEVC video coding standards. He is co-inventor of flexible macroblock ordering (FMO), and tiles, essential features in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and H.265/HEVC, respectively.
Horowitz also has contributed to the early productization of several video coding standards facilitating commercial adoption of those standards including:
2000 – At Polycom, architect and developer of the first commercially available in-product implementation of macroblock-adaptive multiple reference frames (H.263 Annex U). Macroblock-adaptive multiple reference frames has become a mainstay in subsequent video coding standards.
2003 – At Polycom, architect and lead engineer of the team that produced the first commercially available in-product implementation of H.264/AVC.
2008 – At Vidyo, architect and lead engineer of the team that developed the first commercially available in-product implementation of H.264 SVC
2012 – At eBrisk Video, architect and lead engineer of the team that developed one of the first commercially available implementations of H.265/HEVC.
Horowitz is Chief Technology Officer at eBrisk Video and Managing Partner of Applied Video Compression. He is currently on the Technical Advisory Board of Vivox, Inc. and has served on the Technical Advisory Boards of Vidyo, Inc., Hackensack, New Jersey, USA and RipCode, Dallas, Texas, United States.
A.B. degree with distinction in physics from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 1986.
M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University, New York, New York, 1988.
Ph.D. in electrical engineering from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1998.
Standardization
2001-2002 – VCEG Chair, Ad hoc Group on H.26L Complexity Reduction
2002-2003 – JVT Chair, Ad hoc Group on H.26L Complexity Reduction
2002-2003 – JVT Chair, Ad hoc Group on Robustness
2008-2010 – VCEG Chair, Ad hoc Group on Computational Efficiency
2011-2012 – JCT-VC Chair, Ad hoc Group on High-level Parallelism
