Murat Kunt Swiss, b. 1945

Murat Kunt is a Swiss scientist of Turkish origin. He was born in Ankara on 16 January 1945. He is known for his research and teaching in the general field of digital signal processing, in particular image and video processing. He is the author of more than 240 scientific publications, 15 books and 16 patents. He was one of the pioneers of digital image and video compression. Of the 75 doctoral students he has trained, around twenty are already university professors.

He graduated from Istanbul's famous Galatasaray High School in 1963. He then went to university in Lausanne at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where he obtained a degree in nuclear physics. He did his doctoral thesis at the same institution on the compression and transmission of facsimile images. After his thesis, he was a Research Associate and lecturer for more than two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Returning to EPFL, he was appointed Professor by call in 1980 and headed the Signal Processing Laboratory from 1989 until his retirement in 2008.

He has taught at several universities in Europe and around the world, including MIT, the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of California at Berkeley (sabbatical year). His first book, Digital Signal Processing (1980), is one of the leading works in the field and has been translated into several languages, including English.

In 1978, Murat Kunt founded the scientific journal Signal Processing (of which he was editor-in-chief until 2006) and in the same year founded the European Signal Processing Association (EURASIP). In 2006 he founded the new journal Signal, Image and Video Processing, which he edited until 2013.

He has served as Chairman or Scientific Committee Member of several international conferences and on the editorial boards of scientific journals such as Proceedings of the IEEE, Pattern Recognition Letters and Traitement du Signal. He was Co-Chairman of the first European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) held in Lausanne in 1980 and Chairman, also in Lausanne in 1996, of the International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP'96). He was Chairman of the Swiss Pattern Recognition Association from its inception until 1997. He is a scientific advisor to several industries and government offices, including the French National Assembly.

Murat Kunt has received several awards. In 1986 he was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) by his peers. This was followed in 1983 by the EURASIP Meritorious Service Award, in 1996 by the IEEE ASSP technical achievement award, in 2000 by the IEEE Third millennium Medal, in 2001 the Université Catholique de Louvain awarded him the title of Doctor Honoris Causa and in 2003 he was named imaging scientist of the year by IS&T and SPIE, and received the EURASIP technical achievement award.

Several start-up companies have emerged from his laboratory, including Alpvision, Fastcom Technologies, VisioWave, Pixartis and Spinetix.

His opinions are not limited to the scientific field. He regularly publishes his views on society in daily newspapers and weekly magazines.