Biography
Kees Schouhamer Immink, founded Turing Machines Inc., an innovative start-up focused on novel signal processing for hard disk drives and Flash (SSD) memories, in 1998. He was, from 1994 till 2015, an adjunct professor at the Institute for Experimental Mathematics, Essen University, Germany, and visiting professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). He was with Philips research Labs in Eindhoven from 1968 till 1998, where he and his colleagues conducted pioneering experiments with optical videodisc recording. He participated in the experiments that led to the worldwide-accepted standard for the Compact Disc (CD) in 1981. He designed coding techniques of essentially all consumer-type digital audio and video recording products, such as CD-Video, Digital Audio Tape recorder, Digital Compact Cassette system, DCC, Digital Versatile Disc, DVD, Video Disc Recorder, VDR, and Blu-ray Disc. Immink's name appears on around 1100 patents, and he has written more than 250 scientific papers and five books.
More recently, he has turned his attention to, among other things, DNA-based data storage solutions. Most long-term digital archives are now stored on magnetic tape. DNA-based storage systems would take up much less space and last far longer.
Immink has been widely recognized for his contributions to electronics. Queen Beatrix knighted him in 2000. The Â鶹´«Ã½AV has recognized him in 1990, when he was named a Fellow, which was followed by the Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award in 1995, the Information Theory Society's Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation in 1998, the 2000 Edison Medal, and the 2017 Medal of Honor. He has also received the Eduard Rhein Prize, the Gold and Silver Medals of the Audio Engineering Society, the IET Faraday Medal, and Hollywood’s greatest honors: an individual ‘E³¾³¾²â’ from the National Television Academy (NATAS), and the Progress Medal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE). He is an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the Royal Holland Society of Sciences (KHMW), and a foreign member of the (US) National Academy of Engineering (NAE). He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Johannesburg in 2014.
Immink has served in officer and board positions of a number of technical and scientific societies, government and academic organizations - including the Audio Engineering Society, Â鶹´«Ã½AV, SMPTE, and several universities.