Dr. Lawrence A. Rowe is President of FX Palo Alto Laboratory (FXPAL). FXPAL is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fuji Xerox, Ltd. The mission of FXPAL is to produce outstanding research and transfer technology to new products. Under Dr. Rowe's leadership, FXPAL continues research on distributed collaboration, mixed and immersive realities, usable smart environments, ubiquitous documents, and interactive media.
Prior to joining FXPAL in 2007, Dr. Rowe was a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley (1976-2003). He was the founding director of the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center that applied multimedia technology to research and education (1995-2002).
Dr. Rowe is recognized for his research in software-only MPEG-1 video encoding, decoding, and streaming, Internet webcasting, distributed collaboration, database management systems, and database application development tools. His research group developed the Berkeley Lecture Webcasting System, which today produces over 30 course lecture webcasts and podcasts each week viewed world-wide by over 500,000 people per month. Dr. Rowe has published extensively and contributed to several important open source software systems (e.g., Berkeley MPEG-1 Tools, Postgres, Open Mash, etc.). He received several "Best Paper" awards. And, a paper he co-authored with Dr. Michael Stonebraker titled "Design of POSTGRES" published in 1986 received the "1996 ACM SIGMOD Test of Time Award" for a paper that had the most impact over the decade after which it first appeared.
Dr. Rowe co-founded several companies including the original Ingres Corporation that went public in the 1980's. He is an active angel investor, a founding Board member for the corporate incubator Siemens Technology-to-Business, and served on the Board of Directors and Technical Advisory Boards for several high-tech companies including NCast, Inktomi and Dust Inc.
Dr. Rowe received a B.A. in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from U.C. Irvine in 1970 and 1976, respectively. He is an ACM Fellow, past chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (1998-2003), and a co-founding editorial board member of the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications. He also served on numerous administrative and policy committees at U.C. and for agencies of the U.S. government. He was co-recipient of the 2002 U.C. Technology Leadership Council Award for IT Innovation for his development of the Berkeley Lecture Webcasting System. And in 2007, he received the U.C. Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science Distinguished Alumni Award. And in 2009, he received the SIGMM Technical Achievement Award.
