8/2/2010
Joan L. Mitchell (MS 1971, PhD 1974, Physics), a Distinguished Alumni of the College of Engineering, is the 2011 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award recipient.
Written by
Joan L. Mitchell (MS 1971, PhD 1974, Physics), a Distinguished Alumni of the College of Engineering, is the 2011 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award recipient.
Mitchell joined The Exploratory Printing Technologies Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY as a research staff member in 1974. Her first assignment was to “invent new ways to leave marks on paper.” Her first patentable invention was a method of ultrasonic printing. In 1975, she co-invented the Resistive Ribbon Thermal Transfer printing technology which led to IBM’s Selectric Quietwriter typewriter a decade later.
A year later, she switched into the field of data compression and invented novel binary facsimile compression techniques. She wrote IBM’s proposal to the CCITT for an international Two-Dimensional facsimile data compression standard and attended meetings in Geneva and Kyoto in 1978-79 and was manager of one of several teams who created the IBM Series/1 Internal teleconferencing system, eventually installed in over 100 locations worldwide. Mitchell’s fast decompression code for the CCITT fax standard migrated into many IBM products on multiple processors. The researchers also created fast gray-scale compression and decompression. The team gradually migrated into fast rotation scaling up and scaling down of the binary images sometimes combined with binary compression or decompression.
In March 1987, Mitchell attended her first JPEG meeting in Darmstadt, Germany and by 1989 she transferred into ImagePlus marketing focusing on image education, and JPEG. She returned to the research center in the fall of 1991 to co-author the book on JPEG. She was co-editor of the first JPEG standard and pressured the committee to have it “good in both software, and hardware.”
During a two-year leave-of-absence in the mid-1990s, Mitchell worked in IBM Burlington, Vermont, helping to verify a JBIG chip (Joint Bi-level Image experts Group) and co-authored an MPEG book.After returning to IBM full-time, Mitchell transferred to the IBM printing systems division in Boulder, Colorado where her skill with fast facsimile and JPEG decompression, rotation and scaling proved crucial.in eliminating bottlenecks in the high end printers.
Mitchell has also remained connected to her alma mater, spending a sabbatical semester in 1996 as a visiting professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and as a visiting scientist at the Beckman Institute. In February 2005, Mitchell returned to campus for a week-long series of mentoring visits to share her experiences with the Society of Women Engineers, physics women graduate students, and undergraduate students in physics (PHYS 498IPR), and electrical and computer engineering (ECE 200).
She is a Fellow of IEEE, a member of the American Physical Society, Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, Sigma Xi, Society for Imaging Science and Technology, and a former IBM Fellow. She was elected to the IBM academy of Engineering and later became a member of the National Academy of Engineering She holds more than 110 patents and more than 100 published works. In 2006 she received the, Leadership Award from the International Multimedia Telecoms Consortium, and the Alumni Award for Distinguished Service from the College of Engineering. Now retired, Mitchell resides in her hometown of Modesto, CA her outside interests include reading writing, swimming and mentoring friends and colleagues.
__________________
Contact: Celia Elliott, Department of Physics, 217/244-7725,
If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, Engineering Communications Office, 217/244-7716, editor.