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Dr. Anibal Ferreira has been active in signal processing and audio processing research since 1988. He has published over 25 well received papers and is the inventor of 3 key patents in this area. He serves ATC Labs as the Chief Technology Advisor since June 2004.

Dr. Ferreira started his international research career in 1988 when he joined the VLSI Group at Philips Research Labs in Eindhoven (NatLab), The Netherlands, in the area of DSP design using automatic silicon compilation techniques.

In 1990/1991, Dr. Ferreira joined the Signal Processing Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, in New Jersey, where he co-authored the development of the first version of the AT&T Perceptual Audio Coder (PAC). He visited again this Department in 1993 with the purpose to investigate new ways of improving PAC compression efficiency at low data rates. His innovative contributions to PAC, namely adaptive time-frequency techniques of sum-difference stereo transform coding, as well as spectral sectioning procedures optimizing the use of Huffman code books, have been later reflected in the structure of the MPEG-Audio Advanced Audio Coder (AAC) standard.

Dr. Ferreira has been affiliated with INESC Porto (a Portuguese R&D Interface Institute) since 1987, where he conducted research as Senior Researcher and Project Leader till 2001, and as Area Leader from 2001 till 2003. In this context Dr. Ferreira has participated in several European research projects and has been the coordinator of several Portuguese research projects in the areas of real-time audio analysis, synthesis, compression, modification and transcription. One of these projects has supported his participation in the (ISO/IEC) MPEG-4 Audio standardization activities. This participation was particularly active during the competitive phase, from 1995 till 1996, and was motivated by the submission an original audio coding proposal whose ranking in formal MPEG-4 Audio listening tests was clearly competitive at 40 kbit/s compression.

Recent personal research of Dr. Ferreira on audio compression has lead to innovative methods of signal analysis, decomposition and synthesis in the frequency domain, paving the way to dedicated and efficient coding of separate audio objects such as harmonic sounds, transients and stationary noise. In addition to audio compression application, this approach makes possible new functionalities such as semantic scalability and access to compressed audio material. The new approach also allows for "low-delay" encoding and lower/symmetric encoder-decoder complexity, providing new ways for real-time, two-way, high-quality audio communication.

Dr. Ferreira's started an academic career at the School of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP), Portugal in 1995. From 1995 to 1998 he was an assistant lecturer, and continues at present as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has taught courses on Electronics, Signal Theory, Telecommunication Systems, Digital Signal Processing, Multimedia Communication Technologies, and DSP Laboratories. As a faculty member, he also coordinates both under-graduate and post-graduate research work.

He graduated in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Porto, Portugal, in 1988, and received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering, from the same University, in 1992 and 1998, respectively. Dr. Ferreira is a recipient of the ?Portuguese 1998 IBM Scientific Prize? that distinguishes relevant research work on applied computing.

Dr. Ferreira's interests include psychoacoustics, audio analysis and coding, multirate filter banks and algorithms for real-time digital audio applications. He is a member of the AES, IEEE and ASA, and participates in several technical committees including the IEEE Signal Processing Education Technical Committee, and the AES Technical Committee on Semantic Audio Analysis.