Share this page
Share this page E-mail this page Print this page RSS feeds
Home > People > Rico Malvar
Rico Malvar

Managing Director
Microsoft Research Redmond

Henrique Malvar is a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and the Managing Director of Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. Previously, Rico was a founding member of the Signal Processing research group at Microsoft Research, which evolved into the Communication and Collaboration Systems group and the Knowledge Tools group. 

 

Rico's technical contributions at Microsoft include co-development of the Windows Media Audio digital audio format, image compression technologies for Microsoft Office, Tablet PC, Xbox 360 and Flight Simulator X, digital elevation map compression technologies for Flight Simulator X, rights management technologies for Windows Media, new video transform and quantization techniques that were adopted into H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC), ink compression formats for Microsoft Office and Tablet PC, acoustic signal processing technologies for Windows Messenger, Microsoft Office RoundTable, and Windows Vista, and co-development of the HD Photo format for digital pictures, which is the basis for the upcoming JPEG XR standard. His technical interests include audio and video signal enhancement and compression, multirate signal processing, signal decompositions (filter banks, transforms, wavelets), fast algorithms, coding theory, and electronics hardware. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT in 1986.

Before coming to Microsoft, Rico was Vice President of Research and Advanced Technology at PictureTel (later acquired by Polycom). Prior to that, he headed the Digital Signal Processing Research Group at Universidade de Brasília, Brazil. He received the Marconi Young Scientist Award in 1981, was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1997, and received the Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 2002. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis (ACHA) and was until recently an associate editor of the journal IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. He holds over 85 issued patents and has published over 150 technical articles in journals, conferences, technical reports, and standards contributions. Rico is a "carioca", which means he was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Selected Publications

Software

Programs for fast Fourier, cosine, and lapped transforms.

Programs for lapped transforms (e.g. LOT and LBT) for image processing.

Note: these programs are posted in my Microsoft Web page as a courtesy of Microsoft. There's no implied support from Microsoft to those programs; any questions should be sent directly to me. Thanks.

Book Errata

These are small corrections to my book "Signal Processing with Lapped Transforms":

  • Page 110, Eqn. (3.28): F1(z) should be -H0(-z), not H0(-z).
  • Page 110, Eqn. (3.29): f1(n) should be -(-1)nh0(n) = h1(L-1-n).
  • Page 110, Eqn. (3.30): X_hat(z) = (z-(L-1)/2) [H0(z)H0(z-1) + H0(-z)H0(-z-1)] X(z).
  • Page 111, four lines down from Eqn. (3.32): X_hat(z) = (z-(L-1)/2) [U(z) + U(-z)] X(z) = z-(L-1) X(z).
  • Page 125: First sentence of last paragraph: "Vaidyanathan and colleagues".
  • Page 126: First line, "... it can realize any lossless...".
  • Page 184, Eqn. (5.22): the 3rd equation should be h(n) h(n+2M) + h(n+M) h(n+3M) = 0.
  • Page 184, Eqn. (5.23): replace pi/M by pi/(2M).
  • Page 184, Eqn. (5.25): h(M-1-n) = sn0cn1, h(M+n) = cn0sn1.
  • Page 197, Eqn. (5.37), replace n with r.
  • Page 208: 3rd Line after (5.66) should read "... Next, we compute U02, U12, V02 and V12, ..."
  • Page 208, Eqn. (5.68): should be "U01 = -C0, V01 = -S0".

Many thanks to the friends and colleagues who helped me find the bugs: Ricardo de Queiroz, Vladimir Botchev, Vladimir Britanak, James D. Johnston, Donnacha Daly, David Staelin, and especially Fred Chen.