Technology

FRED KITSON
Corporate Vice President, Motorola Applied Research Center

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Fred Kitson leads the Motorola Applied Research Center, a global team of researchers working to uncover the next big things in media mobility. Under his leadership, the Center identifies, researches and develops disruptive breakthroughs and technology foundations that spawn new businesses for Motorola and innovative approaches to solving customer and market problems. The Center leverages Motorola’s technical expertise in broadband communications to deliver multimedia without limits.

Kitson joined Motorola in 2005 as head of the Applications Research Center of Excellence, an international team of researchers focused on personal content handling and entertainment platforms. He has deep expertise in mobile systems, computer systems, consumer appliances and specific technologies such as multimedia digital signal processing, communications, and computer graphics.

The Applications Research vision and architecture led by Kitson had a major impact on the corporate agenda, messaging and technological roadmaps of Motorola. Some of the most significant contributions include the development of a highly resilient MPEG-4 encoder/decoder that delivers high-quality video on mobile phones, liquid media concept and demonstrators to facilitate “seamless media” for different devices and applications, and home media servers to enable enhanced communications with ease of use.

Kitson joined Motorola from Hewlett-Packard (HP), where he had world-wide responsibility for mobile and media systems research for the corporate research labs. There he led and contributed to such projects as HP’s first workstation graphics accelerator, Precision Wide Word Architecture, VOD system, cable modem/set-top box development, mobile devices and services infrastructure, as well as the first mobile content delivery system with DoCoMo.

Recently, Kitson has served as an adjunct faculty member at his alma mater, the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni in 2001. He was the 1991-1992 Clyde Chair visiting associate professor at the University of Utah's Computer Science Department and has taught at the University of California-Berkeley and Colorado State University.

Kitson serves on the engineering advisory boards of the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of California-Davis and the University of Colorado. In addition, he serves on the Board of the Wireless Center at the University of California-San Diego, the Board of Directors for the USC Marshall School of Business Institute for Communication Technology Management (CTM), the Board of Counselors at the University of Southern California's integrated media systems and the UCLA-WINMEC Carrier Advisory Board.

Kitson received a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Delaware, a master's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a doctorate degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Colorado. He is a prolific publisher of technical papers and holds five patents.

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Selected Publications and Invited Papers

"The Future of Wireless Broadband," invited panelist at the Future in Review Conference (FiRe) in San Diego, California, 20 May 2009.

"Visualization of Inter-firm Relations in a Converging Mobile EcoSystem," invited panelist on the Broadband Institute Panel at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, 21 April 2009.

"The Power of Communications + Content + Community," invited keynote at the Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC) in Las Vegas, Nevada, 11 January 2009.

"Signals from the Near Future: The Mobile Guru," invited keynote at the GigaOM Next-Generation Mobile Conference in San Francisco, California, 18 September 2008.

"Educating the Next Generation of Mobile Game Developers," Michael Zyda, Dhruv Thukral, Sumeet Jakatdar, Jonathan Engelsma, James Ferrans, Mat Hans, Larry Shi, Fred Kitson, Venu Vasudevan, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol 27, No 2, pages 96, 92-95, March/April 2007.