Rico Malvar

Henrique "Rico" S. Malvar (born 1957) is a distinguished Brazilian engineer and a signal processing researcher at Microsoft Research's largest laboratory in Redmond, Washington, United States. He was the managing director of the lab following the departure of long-time Managing Director Dan Ling in 2007, when he oversaw about 350 researchers. He was a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft for over 15 years. He retired from Microsoft in January 2023, and later received the title of Microsoft Emeritus Researcher.

Rico is also an Affiliate Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Washington.

History and contributions

Malvar earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Brasília and his master's degree at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1986, where his thesis was on "Optimal pre- and post-filtering in noisy sampled-data systems," and served as a visiting professor at MIT for the next year. From 1979 to 1993, Malvar was a faculty member at the University of Brasília, where he founded and headed the Digital Signal Processing Research Group (in Portuguese, Grupo de Processamento Digital de Sinais or GPDS ).

Malvar is known for the development of the lapped transform, Malvar wavelets, and new algorithms for entropy coding and multimedia signal processing and compression, such as audio and image codecs.

In industry, Malvar served as vice president of Research and Advanced Technology at PictureTel from 1985 to 1987

As of February 2022, he has published over 180 technical articles and has authored or co-authored over 120 issued patents. 2002: Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society 2004: Wavelet Pioneer Award from SPIE 2006: Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft. 2012: Member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE). 2014: 20th Century Landmark Award, IEEE Seattle Section. 2020: Amar G. Bose Industrial Leader Award, IEEE Signal Processing Society. 2022: Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Brasília.