Dr. Joan L. Mitchell

A 2001 IBM Fellow, she was one of the key contributors to the JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) algorithm for photographic image compression as well as some of the MPEG (Motion Picture Expert Group) standards for video. Working at IBM with William B. Pennebaker, she helped fine tune the JPEG standard into something that was also practical for software. When you surf the Internet, use a digital camera, or print a color image, you have benefited from her contributions to compression methods for faster printing and transmission of image files. She served as co-editor of the standard and helped define many of the extensions that made it a flexible tool for image compression. She was also instrumental in solving throughput bottlenecks affecting IBM high-end printers, enabling for the first time full-color page decoding for JPEG at rated speeds. She is a graduate of Stanford University with a B.S. in Physics in 1969, and she received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1971 and 1974, respectively. She joined the Exploratory Printing Technologies group at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center immediately after completing her Ph.D. and was a manager there for nine years. She then worked for three years in IBM Marketing before returning to the IBM Research Division in 1991 to work again in the Image Technologies group as a manager. From 1987 through 1994, she was a member of the ISO and CCITT international Joint Photographic Experts Group which standardized the color image JPEG compression algorithm. She was the final editor of JPEG Part 1, and in 1992, coauthored a book about JPEG. In 1994, she took a two year leave of absence from IBM during which she coauthored a book on MPEG, consulted for IBM Burlington, and was a Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois for six months. She returned to the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as a Research Staff Member in the Image Applications Department. For three years she was on temporary assignment with the IBM Printing Systems Division in Boulder, CO, transferring there permanently in 2002. Since 1976, she has worked in the field of image processing and data compression. She received IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards for Two-Dimensional Data Compression in 1978, for Teleconferencing in 1982, for Image View Facility in 1985, for Resistive Ribbon Thermal Transfer Printing Technology in 1985, for Speed-Optimized Software Implementations of Image Compression Algorithms in 1991, and for the Q-coder in 1991. December 2001, she was awarded an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for Algorithms for Improved Printer Performance Transferred to IBM's Printing Systems Division and her Twenty-first Invention Achievement Plateau Award. She was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology in 1997, and became an IEEE Fellow in 1999. She is a member of APS, IEEE, IS&T, and Sigma Xi and co-inventor on 40 patents. She was made an IBM Fellow in 2001. In 2002, she initiated a Master Inventor program for PSD in Boulder and became a Master Inventor there. She retired from InfoPrint Solutions Company, Boulder, CO, in 2009, where she was an InfoPrint Fellow. She is also a certified PADI Dive Master.