Rico Malvar

Henrique "Rico" S. Malvar (born 1957) is a distinguished Brazilian engineer and a senior signal processing researcher at Microsoft Research's largest laboratory in Redmond, Washington, United States. He was the Managing Director of the lab following the departure of long-time Managing Director Dan Ling in 2007, and oversaw about 350 researchers. Currently, he is the Chief Scientist of Microsoft Research.
History and contributions.
Malvar earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Brasília and his master's degree at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1986, where his thesis was on "Optimal pre- and post-filtering in noisy sampled-data systems," and served as a visiting professor at MIT for the next year. From 1979 to 1993, Malvar was a faculty member at the University of Brasília, where he founded and headed the Digital Signal Processing Research Group (in Portuguese, "Grupo de Processamento Digital de Sinais" or GPDS).
In industry, Malvar served as vice president of Research and Advanced Technology at PictureTel from 1985 to 1987 (which has since been acquired by Polycom). In Fall 1997, he joined Microsoft Research where he co-founded and managed the Signal Processing research group, now the Communication and Collaboration Systems and Knowledge Tools groups. He was a Redmond lab director from 2004 to 2007 before stepping up to become Managing Director. In 2010 he took on a new position of Chief Scientist, working on cross-labs strategic projects. Currently, he leads the Microsoft Research Enable group, which develops technologies to help people with disabilities.
At Microsoft, Malvar contributed to the development of audio coding and digital rights management for the Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Video, and to image compression technologies, such as HD Photo / JPEG XR formats and the RemoteFX bitmap compression, as well as to a variety of tools for signal analysis and synthesis.
As of December 2017, he has published over 160 technical articles and has been issued over 120 patents.
Editorial and committee positions.
Malvar has served as an editor or committee member for the following journals, conferences, and organizations:
Titles and awards.
Malvar holds the following prestigious titles and awards. A sample: