Professor Rowe received a BA in mathematics and a PhD in information and computer science from the University of California at Irvine in 1970 and 1976, respectively. He was a member of the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley from 1967 to 2003 when he retired and is now an Emeritus Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He was the founding director of the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center which was an interdisciplinary research group working on applications of multimedia technology to business, education, research, and society.
Professor Rowe's research interests are multimedia systems and applications with an emphasis on distributed collaboration (e.g., videoconferencing), hypermedia authoring, distance and on-line learning, and video processing and compression. His previous interests were user interface design and development, and database management systems. Professor Rowe headed the research group that produced the Berkeley Multimedia, Interfaces, and Graphics Seminar webcast world-wide on the Internets weekly from January 1995 to December 2002. This technology was deployed to offer live and on-demand courses through the Berkeley Internet Broadcasting System which is now run by the Berkeley Educational Technology Services group - see http://webcast.berkeley.edu/. More details on the design and operation of this system are available at http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/research/publications/2001/160/.
Rowe's research group also developed the Berkeley MPEG1 video tools (i.e., software decoder, parallel encoder, and utilities), the Berkeley Continuous Media Toolkit, algorithms to compute special effects on compressed images, and the Berkeley Distributed Video-on-Demand System. The Berkeley MPEG1 video decoder (mpeg_play) was the first practical software-only MPEG1 video decoder. More than ten million copies of the software have been downloaded for use on the Internet. This code has been widely used in research and product development. And, he has produced several web-based multimedia titles and webcasts.
Professor Rowe is an ACM Fellow. He published over ninety papers on multimedia systems and applications, programming systems, and database systems. He served as Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia from 1998-2003. He is a member of the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMCCAP), and he was a co-editor for a special issue of IEEE Computer Magazine on multimedia (May 1995). He co-authored papers that have won best paper awards at OOPSLA '91, ACM SIGMOD '96, and ACM Multimedia '98. He has organized and chaired several conferences and served on numerous program committees including General Co-Chair for ACM Multimedia 2003.
Professor Rowe serves on various boards for different companies. He was a co-founder of Ingres Corporation and served on the Board of Directors until the company was sold in 1990. He served on the Board of Directors for Siemens Technology-to-Business Corporation from 1999-2003 and the Inktomi Corporation Technical Advisory Board from its inception until it was sold to Yahoo in March 2003. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for nCast Corporation and is a member of the Technical Advisory Board of Dust, Inc.