Awards

Prof. Brandenburg honored with IEEE Signal Processing Industrial Innovation Award

Prof. Karlheinz Brandenburg, the long-time head of the Electronic Media Technology Group at TU Ilmenau, has been honored with the IEEE Signal Processing Industrial Innovation Award for his significant contributions to the standardization of audio coding technology on June 11, 2021. "Awards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest scientific organization in the field of engineering, are always special," said Prof. Brandenburg at the award ceremony. "I am particularly pleased to receive this award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society together with colleagues and friends with whom I worked decades ago and with whom contact has never broken off: James D. Johnston, called JJ, formerly at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and Jürgen Herre, formerly and now at Fraunhofer IIS."

Presented annually to its members by the IEE Signal Processing Society, the world's leading association for signal processing specialists, the award honors individuals and groups whose technical contributions have led to significant societal advances in the use of signal processing technologies. Awardees are selected based on significant industrial achievements, standards development, or the introduction of important processes and products that are of significant benefit to society, use signal processing technologies, and are visible beyond companies and institutions. This year's award was presented at the 46th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), held as an online conference from June 8-11, 2021.

Known worldwide for his contribution to the MP3 standard, Karlheinz Brandenburg headed the Department of Electronic Media Technology at TU Ilmenau until April 2020. He was also head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT in Ilmenau for almost 20 years, producing globally recognized research results in the fields of audio coding, psychoacoustics, wave field synthesis, and audio and video analysis in the course of joint work. At the Institute of Media Technology at TU Ilmenau, the electrical engineer and mathematician, who has received numerous other national and international awards, remains active as a senior professor and conducts applied research and development in the field of immersive audio technologies with Brandenburg Labs, a spin-off of TU Ilmenau and Fraunhofer IDMT which was founded in 2019.

Prof. Brandenburg is very pleased about the recognition of his achievements with the IEEE Signal Processing Industrial Innovation Award: "The standardization of audio technologies continues to be an important topic. For the past two years, the Electronic Media Technology department at TU Ilmenau has been working together with Fraunhofer IDMT on the new "MPEG-I" standard - I for immersive - that is, on systems that will enable perfect audio illusion for virtual and augmented realities in the future."

The IEEE Signal Processing Society is the world's leading association for signal processing specialists with more than 19,000 members. These include engineers, industry professionals, academics, and students from more than 100 countries worldwide.