Biography

Henry Holtzman has been a member of the MIT community since 1981, joining the Media Lab as a researcher when it opened in 1985. He was the Lab's Chief Knowledge Officer and a co-director of the Digital Life Consortium, and directs the Information Ecology research group. In addition, Holtzman co-directed the Lab's CE 2.0 initiative, a collaboration with more than 40 Media Lab sponsor companies to formulate the principles for a new generation of consumer electronics that are highly connected, seamlessly interoperable, situation-aware, and radically simple.

Holtzman has led research projects in the areas of tangible networking and image compression, resulting in desktop applications for RFID such as the Smart Mousepad, multicast network architectures for multimedia, IP television, scale-free image representation, and knowledge-based video representation. As a member of the MPEG standardization committee, he helped to define MPEG-2 video technology, used in DirecTV, DVD, digital cable, and digital TV broadcasting. Holtzman has been granted multiple patents for his inventions.

Holtzman has extensive experience with RFID, computer programming, hardware design, operating systems, and network architecture. He has worked with Codex, a subsidiary of Motorola Inc.; Apple Computer; Hearst New Media; and Art Technology Group. He was founder, CEO, and CTO of Presto Technologies, Inc., a Media Lab spinoff that introduced many novel uses for RFID to the market. He received his MS in media arts and sciences, and his BS in computer science, both from MIT.