Dr. Klaus Illgner is the Managing Director of the Institut für Rundfunktechnik (IRT), the central research lab of public broadcasters in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In 1991 he received a degree in electrical engineering with an emphasis on communications engineering at Aachen University of Technology, Germany. Subsequently he was employed as a research assistant at the Institut for Communications Engineering, RWTH Aachen, where he conducted research in the area of digital image processing, and coding and transmission of digital video. In January 1998 he earned a doctorate with summa cum laude in electrical engineering from RWTH Aachen for his thesis on "Scalable Videocoding". He has also worked at Texas Instruments, Dallas, USA and with Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, Munich, where he was responsible for a team developing new technologies in the field of multimedia communications in heterogeneous networks.