Gary Sullivan

He was the chairman of the Joint Video Team (JVT) standardization committee that developed the H.264/AVC standard, and he personally edited large portions of it. Since January 2010, he has been a co-chairman of the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) and an editor for developing the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. He has also led and contributed to a number of other video and image related standardization projects such as extensions of ITU-T H.263 video coding, multiview and 3D video coding for AVC and HEVC, and JPEG XR image coding. Since October 2015, he has been a co-chairman of the Joint Video Exploration Team (JVET) for exploration of video coding beyond the capability of HEVC. He has also published research work on various topics relating to video and image compression.

Prior to joining Microsoft in 1999, he was the manager of communications core research at PictureTel Corporation, the former world leader in videoconferencing communication. He was previously a Howard Hughes Fellow and member of technical staff in the Advanced Systems Division of Hughes Aircraft Company, and a terrain-following radar system software engineer for Texas Instruments.

Sullivan was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and attended the Ascension and St. Margaret Mary elementary schools and Trinity High School, graduating in 1978. He received B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Louisville J. B. Speed School of Engineering, Kentucky, in 1982 and 1983, respectively. He received Ph.D. and Engineer degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1991.

Gary Joseph Sullivan (born 1960) is an American electrical engineer who led the development of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and HEVC video coding standards and created the DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) API/DDI video decoding feature of the Microsoft Windows operating system.