Lawrence A. Rowe was recently named President of FX Palo Alto Laboratory, which is a small, leading edge multimedia research organization. Prior to accepting this position, he was a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley for over twenty-five years before retiring in 2003. He was the founding director of the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center (1995-2002), which explored the application of multimedia technology to education and research.

Professor Rowe is both a researcher and entrepreneuer. He is known for his research on software-only MPEG-1 encoding, decoding, and streaming, Internet webcasting, distributed collaboration, and database management systems and application development tools. He published extensively about this research and either lead or contributed to several important open source software systems (e.g., Berkeley MPEG-1 Tools, Postgres, Open Mash, etc.) and several multimedia titles (e.g., ACM SIGRAPH Video Database, 2005 NOSSDAV Conference Presentations, etc.). Several papers he authored or co-authored received "Best Paper" awards from the ACM Multimedia and OOPSLA conferences. He co-authored with Michael Stonebraker a paper titled the "Design of POSTGRES" published at SIGMOD 1986 that was awarded the "1996 SIGMOD Test of Time Award" for a paper that in the intervening decade had the most impact.

As an entrepreneur he co-founded several companies, one of which went public in the late 1980's (Ingres Corp); he has served on the Board of Directors and Technical Advisory Boards for many high-tech companies (e.g., NCast, Inktomi, Dust Inc., etc.); he has made angel investments in early stage companies; and, he served on the Siemens Technology-to-Business (TTB) Board of Directors for four years. Siemens TTB is a corporate incubator whose goal is to develop products either to spin-in to a Siemens Product Division or spin-out into a venture capital funded new enterprise.

Professor Rowe received a BA degree in mathematics and a PhD in Information and Computer Science from U.C. Irvine in 1970 and 1976, respectively. He is a Fellow of the ACM, past chair of ACM SIG Multimedia (1998-2003), and a founding member of the ACM Trans. on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications editorial board. He has served on numerous administrative and policy committees at the University of California and for agencies of the U.S. government. He was a co-recipient of the U.C. Technology Leadership Council 2002 Larry L. Sautter Award for Innovation in Information Technology for his leadership of the development of the Berkeley Lecture Webcasting system. And, he received the U.C. Irvine 2007 Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science Distinguished Alumni Award.