William A. Pearlman, Ph.D., is the Founder, President, and Chief Scientific Officer of PrimaComp, Inc. He is also Professor Emeritus in the Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is best known as co-inventor of two celebrated image compression algorithms, Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT) and Set Partitioning Embedded Block (SPECK) coding. Dr. Pearlman obtained his B.S. and M.S. degrees at MIT and his Ph.D. at Stanford University. He has authored or co-authored more than 250 publications in the fields of image and video compression, information theory, communications theory, and digital signal processing. He is lead author of the textbook, Digital Signal Compression: Principles and Practice, with co-author Amir Said, published by Cambridge University Press. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a Fellow of the SPIE- The InternationalSociety for Optical Engineering.