Curtis R. Carlson, Ph.D., became president and CEO of SRI International in December 1998. Previously, he spent more than 20 years with Sarnoff Corporation, an SRI subsidiary that was fully integrated into SRI in 2011.
In 1973, Carlson joined RCA Laboratories, which became part of SRI in 1987 as Sarnoff Corporation. He started and helped lead the high-definition television (HDTV) program that became the U.S. standard, and in 1997 his team won an Emmy Award for outstanding technical achievement. In 2000, another team started and led by Carlson won an Emmy for a system to optimize satellite broadcast image quality. He has helped found more than 12 companies.
Carlson is widely sought as a speaker and thought leader on innovation and global competitiveness, and has served on numerous scientific advisory boards and task forces. He has been on numerous boards, including Nuance Communications and Pyramid Vision.
He wrote a book with William Wilmot called Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want, published by Random House. It was selected by BusinessWeek as one of the top 10 business books for 2006.
Carlson received his B.S. degree in physics from Worchester Polytechnic Institute and was named in Who's Who Among Students. He is a member of Sigma Xi, and Tau Beta Pi. His M.S. and Ph.D. degrees are from Rutgers University. Carlson has published or presented numerous technical publications and holds fundamental patents in the fields of image quality, image coding, and computer vision.
