Dr. Wim Sweldens

"Experiences with Corporate Intrapreneurship"

Thursday, November 16, 4:00 PM

Packard Lab -- 101

Over the last decade there has been tremendous change in how scientific innovations are brought to market.  The Internet and other globalization trends have dramatically shortened the time in which innovations can go from the lab to the market. In this talk we examine various mechanisms for technology transfer and discuss what works and what does not. We include several examples and discuss experiences from the new technology commercialization effort in Bell Labs.

Wim Sweldens is Technology Commercialization Sr. Vice President at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies. He is responsible for identifying key Bell Labs innovations and rapidly bringing them to market by creating focused entrepreneurial minded teams. Previously he was the Computing Sciences Research Vice President at Bell Laboratories and headed the computer science and software research activities with focus on security, software quality, systems, applications, and scientific computing. Wim received his PhD in Computer Science in 1994 from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and has been with Bell Labs since 1995.  He has conducted research in multiscale signal processing, computer graphics, and wireless communications. He is the inventor of the lifting scheme, a new wavelet construction and transformation method which has been included in the JPEG2000 standard.  MIT's "Technology Review" chose him in 1999 as one of 100 most promising young innovators. In 2003 he was elected to fellow of the IEEE for contributions to multiresolution methods for image and 3D geometry compression. He currently serves on the board of the Computing Research Association (CRA).