Kees Schouhamer Immink

Kees Schouhamer Immink, born in 1946, is a Dutch engineer, inventor and entrepreneur who helped create the digital era of audio, video and data recording, including the compact disc, DVD and Blu-ray disc. He gained an engineer's degree in electrical engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology in 1974 and a doctorate there in 1985, and he spent thirty years at Philips Research in Eindhoven, joining in 1967 and leaving in 1998, with the title of Research Fellow from 1994. After working on the laserdisc he joined the joint Philips and Sony effort on the compact disc, where he devised eight to fourteen modulation, a code that raised the playing time by thirty percent, and he later created EFMPlus for the DVD and contributed to the code design of Blu-ray. He holds more than 1,100 patents, received the IEEE Edison Medal in 1999 and the IEEE Medal of Honor in 2017, and has led Turing Machines Inc since founding it in 2001.