Elected Adcom

An independent Broadcast Industry advisor and a guest speaker at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Dr. Peter Siebert career spans 35 years. He has held various positions within the Broadcast industry, most recently he was the Executive Director at the DVB Project Office in Geneva, where he was responsible for all organizational and technology related aspects of the DVB.  Prior to this he was with Siemens AG, where he was influential in the design of the end-to-end IPTV and set-top box solution; at SES-ASTRA he was instrumental in the introduction of digital television via satellite, for Europe, based on the DVB/MPEG-2 standards; and at Philips Kommunikations AG, he managed digital audio and visual transmission. 

His involvement has been in all aspects of audio-video transmission such as video transmission over telecommunication networks (PDH/SDH), satellite and IPTV networks. He was responsible for several ETSI specifications in the area of satellite transmission, as well as for DVB standards.  He holds several patents for various aspects of audio and visual data transmission. 

Peter Symes worked in the television and related industries from 1967 until his retirement in 2016.

His early career included BS (honors) 1967 from University of Wales, and positions in the BBC Studio Planning & Installation Department, Philips Broadcast, and Central Dynamics Ltd.

In 1983 he joined Grass Valley Group (subsequently Tektronix, subsequently Thomson Broadcast), and held positions responsible for product planning, strategic planning, intellectual property management, and technological liaison.  He represented Grass Valley in many organizations including the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE).  In July 2007 Symes  joined SMPTE staff as Director of Standards & Engineering, a position held until retirement in 2016.

Symes holds three patents and is the joint recipient of an Emmy award for the architecture of the digital picture processor.  He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a Fellow of SMPTE, and a Certified Standards Professional (2013) by the Society for Standards Professionals (SES).

Peter has written and presented numerous papers at industry conferences, and is the author of three books on Video Compression, all published by McGraw Hill.  He has also contributed to other books, including two editions of the NAB Engineering Handbook.

Symes served on the Board of Governors of SMPTE from 1987 to 2007, and on the Board of Directors of ATSC from 2009 to 2015.

Yiyan Wu (Fellow 2001) received the M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, in 1986 and 1990, respectively. 

He is a Principal Research Scientist of the Communications Research Centre Canada (CRC).  Dr. Wu’s research interests include broadband multimedia communications, digital broadcasting, and communication systems engineering.  He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, an adjunct professor of Carleton University, and Western University in Canada.  Dr. Wu is a member of the ATSC Board of Directors, representing IEEE.  He is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting. He has been named a Member of the Order of Canada, since 2018.

Jim Stenberg is the EVP of RF infrastructure at Signal Infrastructure Group PBC.   In his position he oversees the design, specification, procurement, installation and operation of nextgen TV Single Frequency Networks (SFN) and other RF equipment.   Prior to joining SIG, he was with American Tower Corporation for 8 years as a principal broadcast RF engineer where he was a subject matter expert for the company regarding broadcast antennas and rf systems particularly their multi-tenant broadband systems.  Earlier he ran his own broadcast consulting and field service business, worked for several filter/antenna manufacturers and designed and built numerous TV and FM RF systems.  In 2020 he was awarded the NAB Television Engineering Achievement Awarded.  He lives in Portland, Maine and has a BSEE from the University of Massachusetts - Lowell.

Liang Zhang [M’11, SM’14, F’22] received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in the department of electrical and computer engineering from the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada, in 1998 and 2002. Dr. Zhang is a Senior Research Scientist with the Communications Research Centre Canada (CRC), Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and is currently responsible for research program coordination and oversight. His main research areas include convergence of next generation broadband and broadcast systems, spectrum monitoring and data analysis, and spectrum policies. He has been deeply involved in the ATSC 3.0 standardization activities on developing the layered-division-multiplexing (LDM) technology, in-band distribution link (IDL), integrated access and backhaul (IAB), and inter-tower communications network (ITCN).

Dr. Zhang is an IEEE Fellow, Chair of IEEE Broadcast Technology Society (BTS) Fellows Evaluation Committee, previous Chair of IEEE BTS Distinguished Lecturer Committee, elected member of the IEEE BTS Administrative Committee (AdCom), IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting and IET Communications Journal. Dr. Zhang has more than 100 peer-reviewed Journal and conference publications, many technical contributions on Digital Radio Broadcast (DAB) and ATSC 3.0 standards, and received over ten Best Paper Awards from IEEE, IBC and NAB for his work on the next generation ATSC 3.0 and the 5G broadcasting systems.

Shuji Hirakawa received Ph.D. degree from University of Tokyo in 1978. As a Ph.D. student, he pioneered research on “coded modulation”. His ground-breaking work was published in a paper, co-authored with Professor Hideki Imai, in the IEEE Transactions on Information Technology (Vol. IT-23, pp.371-377, 1977.) and was selected as one of seventeen papers to receive IEEE Golden Jubilee Paper Award in 1998. Additionally, the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE) in Japan gave him the honor of IEICE Centennial Milestone in September 2017 identifying their work as one of the origins of “Codec Modulation.”

Dr. Hirakawa joined Toshiba Corporation in 1978. In late 80’s and early 90’s, he was deeply involved in the development of MUSE encoder for analog HDTV transmission. From 1998, his group developed a new broadcasting satellite service (BSS) system for digital sound broadcasting and was adopted by Japanese industrial standardization body (ARIB) as the domestic standard. In ITU-R, he developed Recommendation BO.1130 System E for Japanese BSS (sound) in 1999 and 2000. He left Toshiba Corporation in March 2017 and joined Japanese Standards Association in July 2017.

Dr. Hirakawa has been a key member in many international standardization organizations. He was a vice-chairman of ITU-R WP 6M (multimedia and interactive broadcasting system) and WP 6B (broadcast service assembly and access) until Oct. 2015 for digital broadcasting transmission side standardization. In parallel, he was the Secretary of IEC TC 100 (audio, video and multimedia systems and equipment) from 2004 to 2010 for digital broadcasting receiving side. From 2011 to 2016, he was the IEC Standardization Management Board (SMB) member representing the IEC National Committee of Japan. Currently, he is the Chair of IEC TC 124 (wearable electronic devices and technologies) from June 2017.

In IEEE, he was an editorial board member of the Proceeding of the IEEE from 2006 to 2012. He was the Secretary 2004-05, the Vice Chairman 2006-07 and the Chairman 2008-09 of IEEE Broadcast Technology Japan Chapter. Additionally, he hosted IEEE International Symposium on Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting (BMSB) 2016 in Nara City, Japan.

Dr. Hirakawa is an IEEE Life Fellow and an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting.

shuji.hirakawa@ieee.org

James E. O’Neal has been involved in broadcast technology for more than half a century, beginning with employment during his early teen years at a commercial radio station (KXAR) in his hometown of Hope, Arkansas. He continued to work in both radio and television operations on a part-time basis throughout his high school and college years, beginning a fulltime broadcast engineering career after receiving his college degree. James worked in broadcast engineering for nearly 37 years before retiring in 2005 and launching a second career as technology editor at TV Technology magazine. He held this position for nearly a decade, and now serves as technology consultant for that publication. More than 30 years of Mr. O’Neal’s broadcast engineering career was spent with U.S. Government television operations, including the United States Information Agency’s Television and Film Service, WORLDNET Television, and VOA-TV. During his association with these organizations, James assisted in launching the USIA’s first global satellite-delivered television network, and was heavily involved in both television facility design and satellite transmission engineering operations. He enjoys researching and writing about broadcasting history and persons who have made important contributions in this field. He is a frequent contributor to TV Technology and its sister publications, Radio World. He enjoys collecting and restoring both consumer radio and television items and commercial broadcasting equipment, including an operating replica of the 1947-vintage small town radio station where he began his broadcasting career. Mr. O’Neal is a 1969 graduate of the University of Arkansas and holds both commercial and amateur radio licenses. He is holds Professional Broadcast Engineer and Broadcast Networking Engineer certification from the Society of Broadcast Engineers. He is a Life Fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and a Life Member of the Society of Broadcast Engineers, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. In addition, he serves as a member of the IEEE’s Editorial Advisory Board and is a member of the IEEE’s BTS administrative committee. James serves as editor-in-chief of the BTS’s Broadcast Technology publication and is also the organization’s historian. He also serves on the SMPTE Board of Editors, and is an associate editor of that organization’s Motion Imaging Journal.