Professor Susanto Rahardja was born in Jakarta, Indonesia. He received the B.Eng. degree from the National University of Singapore in 1991, and the M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees from the Nanyang Technological University in 1993 and 1997 respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. His research interests include multimedia signal processing and interactive digital media in which he has published more than 250 publications in internationally refereed journals and conferences. He joined the Centre for Signal Processing at Nanyang Technological University as a research engineer in 1996 and was later appointed as Assistant Director of the Centre in 2001. He was the Director of Media Division at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R) from 2002 to 2007, where he led 150 full-time researchers in a broad range of media related research that cover areas in Signal Processing (audio coding, video/image processing), Media Analysis (text/speech, image, video), Media Security (biometrics, computer vision and surveillance) and Sensor Networks. At I²R, he is currently the Deputy Executive Director (Research) where he oversees all the research activities. Concurrently, he is a Principal Scientist and the Head of Signal Processing Department at I²R.

Professor Rahardja was the recipient of the IEE Hartree Premium Award for the best journal paper published in IEE Proceedings in 2002. From 2002 - 2007, Dr Rahardja actively participated in the international ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 (Moving Picture Expert Group, or MPEG) where he contributed to the development of MPEG-4 Scalable to Lossless System (SLS) in which the technology was adopted as Reference Model 0 by MPEG in July 2003. In 2003, he received the Tan Kah Kee Young Inventors’ Gold award in the Open Category for his contributions to scalable to lossless audio compression technology. This technology was subsequently published as a normative international standard in June 2006 (ISO/IEC 14496-3:2005/Amd.3:2006). He also led the team to develop an adaptive predictor technology for the audio lossless codec which was incorporated in the MPEG-4 Audio Lossless System (ALS) under the high performance profile (ISO/IEC 14496-3:2005/Amd.2:2006). In recognition of his significant contributions to the national standardization program, Dr Rahardja was awarded the Standards Council Merit Award by SPRING Singapore in 2006. In addition, for leadership and technical contribution to advancement of digital audio signal processing and its adoption to the MPEG, he was awarded the National Technology Award in 2007. He also received the A*STAR Most Inspiring Mentor Award in 2008, I²R Achiever of the Year Award (Research) in 2007, I²R Achiever of the Year Award (Development) in 2009, I²R Achiever of the Year Award (Research) in 2010, and was a Finalist of the 2010 World Technology & Summit Award, as well as other awards.

Dr Rahardja has served in several boards, advisory and technical committees in various ACM, IEEE and SPIE related professional activities in the areas of multimedia. He is one of the elected members of the Technical Committee of the Visual Signal Processing and Communications, Circuits and Systems for Communications and Multimedia Systems and Applications of the IEEE Circuits & Systems Society. He was the Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing from 2007 – 2011. Currently, he is serving as the Associate Editors for the Elsevier Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. He served as the Conference Chair of Multimedia Systems and Applications at SPIE OpticsEast Symposium from 2006 to 2007 as well as Symposium Co-chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Multiple-Valued logic in 2006. He was also the Industry and Government Advisor of 1st ACM SIGGRAPHASIA 2008, the General Chair of 7th ACM SIGGRAPH VRCAI 2008, General Chair of Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA) Annual Summit and Conference 2010 and General Chair of 5th ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA 2012. Since 2004, he is the Council member of National IT Standards Committee in Singapore. In 2005, he chaired a thematic strategic research program at A*STAR in the “mobile media” theme where more than US$5 millions projects were awarded. He served as a panel member for Science & Technology Plan 2015 and Science & Technology Value Creation 2015 for A*STAR. He is currently the President of SIGGRAPH Singapore Chapter (SSC) and Southeast Asia Graphics (SEAGRAPH) society, Board of Gorvernor of Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA), Member of the Management Board of Interactive Digital Media Institute at the National University of Singapore and Scientific Advisor of Faculty of Computer Science, Prince of Songkla University in Thailand. Dr. Rahardja holds an adjunct appointment of Full Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the National University of Singapore. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

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