Henrique Malvar
Distinguished Engineer and Managing Director
Microsoft Research Redmond
Microsoft Corp.

Henrique “Rico” Malvar became the managing director of the Microsoft Research Redmond lab in March 2007. Previously, Malvar was one of the directors of the lab since the summer of 2004, and before that he was a senior researcher in and manager of the Signal Processing Group since its inception in the fall of 1997; the group evolved into the current Communication and Collaboration Systems Knowledge Tools Group. Malvar’s own technical interest is mostly in signal compression and enhancement, fast algorithms, multirate filter banks, and multiresolution transforms.

After earning his bachelor’s degree at the University of Brasilia and a master’s degree at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Malvar received a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1986. He was a visiting professor at MIT for the 1986–87 academic year, and he was a member of the faculty of the Universidade de Brasília from 1979 to 1993. From 1993 to 1997 he was with PictureTel Corp. as vice president of Research and Advanced Development.

Malvar has served in many academic roles, including associate editorship of the journals IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis, and member of the technical committee for the ICASSP and DCC conferences. He is a member of the advisory committee for the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering of the National Science Foundation.

Malvar is a fellow of the IEEE. He received the Young Scientist award from the Marconi International Fellowship and the Herman Goldman Foundation in 1981, the Best Paper Award in Image Processing from the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 1992, the Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 2002, and the Wavelet Pioneer Award from the SPIE in 2004. He has published over 140 technical papers in journals, conferences and standards groups, and is the inventor or a co-inventor of over 70 issued patents. At Microsoft Corp. his main technical contributions were the co-development of the Microsoft Windows Media Audio and HD Photo formats, and contributions to the Windows Media Video format, as well as the development of new signal analysis and synthesis tools that are used for audio identification, watermarking, noise reduction, and acoustic echo cancellation. He also likes to write code: Some of his code ships in Windows Vista, the Microsoft Office system, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Windows Media, “Flight Simulator X,” Xbox 360 and other Microsoft products.

Malvar was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. When he is not working with computers, he’s playing with them — usually taking them apart and experimenting with all kinds of new hardware and software components. He enjoys playing soccer (rarely), is tricked into hiking by his wife, and is a motor racing fan.