I feel obliged to write this page. This most extraordinary ride on media bits that I have had in the last quarter of a century has been a truly unique, if exhausting, experience. Almost every day I have been confronted with the need to make decisions, sometimes of far reaching implications, and I have been making those decisions in full consciousness of their importance and of my inadequacy to handle them but with the determination of doing the best I could. I am ready to take the credit, when there is any, and the blame, if there is any, for each of my actions. Fortunately I was not alone in this ride and the purpose of this page is to acknowledge the people to whom I owe gratitude.
The first persons to thank are my parents Giuseppe and Luigina. To my father I owe the insuppressible drive to learn and to my mother the availability of practical means to realise the ideas my father instilled on me. Then my thanks go to my wife Anna who has taken on herself so much more of the family burden to let me achieve my project, and to Filippo, Riccardo and Isabella who have filled our family life with joy and, sometimes, sorrow.
Next I would like to thank the teachers in my schools and particularly those of the secondary school for giving me the humanistic education that is such an important part of myself and particularly the memory of don Mario Bonello for helping me jump into University in the right conditions; my professors at the Polytechnic of Turin for providing me the technical education that is at the basis of the professional life I conducted in the last 48 years, and particularly the memory of Prof. Mario Boella for creating the opportunity of an internship at KDD Labs that changed my life; and the memory of Prof. Hiroshi Miyakawa also for his kind assistance during my Ph.D. years at the University of Tokyo.
I would also like to thank the people in the HDTV Workshop, my first international initiative, the people in DAVIC, FIPA, OPIMA, SDMI, DMP and dmin.it. MPEG is obviously a special case and I have to thank Hiroshi Yasuda, the MPEG Chairs, the Heads ofDelegatio (who have now become Advidors) and countless members for donating the hundreds of thousands of hours that transformed ideas into standards that changed the industry and the lives of billions of people.
I would like to thank the people at the Multimedia Division of CSELT for providing me with concrete bases against which to check the validity of my ideas. Particular thanks go to the last Director General of CSELT Cesare Mossotto for letting me explore new avenues of research and development, in the true spirit that made the telco industry great in its capability to combine the function of wealth creation with the well being and progress of mankind – both of which latter day successors seem to have lost the way to do it.
Lastly I would like to thank the people who are working for me at CEDEO for helping transform my ideas in this latter phase of my life intro products and services.