Technical Contributions
Rico is the inventor or co-inventor of over 120 issued U.S. patents (opens in new tab) and over 170 technical articles (opens in new tab) in journals, conferences, technical reports, and standards contributions.
Rico’s technical contributions include the development of lapped transforms (opens in new tab) (used in multimedia formats, Internet telephony, DSL modems, and other applications), and Malvar wavelets (opens in new tab) (a class of local trigonometric transforms, also known as Malvar-Wilson bases (opens in new tab) or Malvar-Coifman-Meyer wavelets). At Microsoft his contributions include co-development of the Windows Media Audio digital audio format, image and data compression technologies for Microsoft Windows, Office, Hyper-V, Tablet PC, Bing Maps, and Xbox, rights management technologies for Windows Media, entropy coders (opens in new tab) for bitmap compression in Windows RDP/RemoteFX, new video transformation and quantization and new color transformation techniques that were adopted into H.264 (opens in new tab) (the most used video format for digital TV and Internet video, e.g. YouTube, Netflix, etc.), and audio signal processing technologies for Windows, Skype, RoundTable, Xbox, and Kinect. Rico’s PTC image codec was the basis for the development of the new Microsoft HD Photo format for digital pictures, which has been adopted by the ISO (opens in new tab) and the ITU-T (opens in new tab) as the new JPEG XR standard (opens in new tab). His technical interests include signal enhancement and compression, especially of audio and images, multirate signal processing, signal decompositions (filter banks, transforms, wavelets), fast algorithms, coding theory, electronic circuits and hardware, and novel multimedia-based human-computer interfaces, especially for accessibility.