InterDigital Honors Wireless and Video Innovation Leaders Michael Starsinic and Fabrice Le Léannec as Inventors of the Year

WILMINGTON, Del., Feb. 22, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- InterDigital, Inc. (Nasdaq: IDCC), a mobile, video and AI technology research and development company, annually honors the company’s outstanding inventors for the ingenuity and impact of their innovation. This year, InterDigital has named Michael Starsinic and Fabrice Le Léannec both as the 2024 Inventor of the Year award winners, recognizing their expertise and innovative contributions in wireless communication and video delivery protocols that empower the connected experiences we enjoy today, and can expect for the future.

Inventors remain the cornerstone of InterDigital’s innovation. This year’s Inventor of the Year award celebrates two inventors whose research contributions have influenced the wireless and video standards that make seamless communication of data and content across a variety of device types, services, and network capabilities possible. Michael’s patented innovations in IoT and beyond 5G network capabilities and Fabrice’s patented contributions to the evolution of state-of-the-art video codecs both unlock new efficiencies in network communications and content delivery to support increasingly exciting and data-rich experiences.

“At InterDigital, our innovation impact is earned and maintained by world-class inventors like Fabrice and Michael who push the boundaries of what is possible in our communications,” said Liren Chen, President and CEO at InterDigital. “While each are unique, this year’s Inventor of the Year award winners are both recognized for their commitment to technology advancement, their collaborative nature, and the impact of their innovations in delivering new capabilities and efficiencies across our networks, devices, and services.”

InterDigital 2024 Inventor of the Year Award Winners

Michael Starsinic

Since joining InterDigital in 2000, Michael Starsinic has led research initiatives, contributed to standards, and developed a strong portfolio of innovation advancing network architecture and communications protocols for IoT and 5G-enabled devices. Throughout his extensive career, Michael has shaped the standards driving efficiency in IoT communications and fostered improvements to network protocols to support new services like extended reality and haptic-enhanced communications.

As an inventor, Michael is inspired by the long tail of innovation and the challenge of consistently developing new contributions to improve the status quo. Michael’s patented inventions have largely addressed improvements to the protocols that make device and application communication with the network efficient. In addition to his significant contributions to Convida, a joint venture between InterDigital and Sony dedicated to IoT research and innovation, Michael’s early research in service capability exposure, or the ways different IoT applications interact with the core network, has evolved to support 5G network communication with more complex and data intense applications, like augmented and extended reality (AR/XR).

Michael is well respected throughout industry and standards circles, and he cites his collaborations with colleagues as fuel for his innovation. Whether through contributions to the oneM2M and 3GPP standards ecosystems or forward-looking research that enhances network support for next-gen devices and applications, Michael is an esteemed inventor influencing system architectures and communications protocols that unlock incredible new capabilities for networks and consumers alike.

Fabrice Le Léannec

Fabrice Le Léannec is a Brittany-based Senior Principal Researcher shaping next generation video codecs through his significant contributions to the High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC) and Versatile Video Codec (VVC) and their specifications in the MPEG standards. In 2013, Fabrice joined Technicolor Research and Innovation (which was later acquired by InterDigital in 2019), but he has been researching and contributing to the advancement of video compression and codecs for nearly thirty years. At InterDigital, Fabrice has dedicated his research to developing new algorithms and improvements to achieve greater efficiencies from state-of-the-art video compression.

With a strong competitive spirit and a drive to discover new ideas and approaches to make video compression even more efficient, Fabrice has patented innovations that unlock new avenues to reduce the bitrate of compressed video while maintaining equivalent video quality. As our communications and experiences become increasingly rich with video data, Fabrice’s expertise and contributions to the HEVC, VVC, and future-looking video codecs helps make seamless streamed content delivery across devices possible.

Looking ahead, Fabrice is intrigued by the application of AI within video compression and the ways it will influence new designs of the codec and drive greater gains over state-of-the-art solutions. Today, he remains a critical contributor and collaborator within InterDigital’s Video Lab with research that is consistently recognized by the MPEG and JVET standards communities.

About InterDigital^®

InterDigital is a global research and development company focused primarily on wireless, video, artificial intelligence (“AI”), and related technologies. We design and develop foundational technologies that enable connected, immersive experiences in a broad range of communications and entertainment products and services. We license our innovations worldwide to companies providing such products and services, including makers of wireless communications devices, consumer electronics, IoT devices, cars and other motor vehicles, and providers of cloud-based services such as video streaming. As a leader in wireless technology, our engineers have designed and developed a wide range of innovations that are used in wireless products and networks, from the earliest digital cellular systems to 5G and today’s most advanced Wi-Fi technologies. We are also a leader in video processing and video encoding/decoding technology, with a significant AI research effort that intersects with both wireless and video technologies. Founded in 1972, InterDigital is listed on Nasdaq.

InterDigital is a registered trademark of InterDigital, Inc.

For more information, visit: www.interdigital.com.