Gerard Fernando, PhD

Dr. Gerard Fernando is the Scientific Advisor to Zone24x7.

He guides and provides direction to Zone24x7 in the areas of security, media and strategic technology.

Dr. Fernando is a Partner and Co-founder of Compression Labs Inc., an organization dedicated to provide media encoding solutions. His vast industry experience includes specializing in technology commercialization from conception, leading the definition of architectural roadmap through to product launch including technology licensing. He holds a successful track record in building and managing diverse engineering teams and having hands-on experience. During his distinguished career, he has been rendering his services to Sun Microsystems, USA and Philips Research Laboratories, UK. Dr. Fernando has 11 patents awarded, a few more pending and also has done several publications to globally accepted conferences and journals. He has co-authored “Network Protocols for IP Streaming of Audio-visual Content”.

Dr. Fernando has participated and led standards activities in ISO/MPEG and IETF where the main focus of standardization activities has been on audio-visual media, including Java in MPEG. Recently he managed and was the technical lead on the Media Central product program at Sun Microsystems.

His significant contributions to a leading technology company include successfully building new business worth $50M. His accomplishments include developing Digital Rights Management (DRM) strategy and solutions. Dr. Fernando holds strong technical expertise in several key areas including, codecs, media streaming, and DRM.

He obtained his Phd in Electrical Engineering from the Imperial College, University of London, UK.

He lives with his family in the UK.

James C. Bliss, PhD

Dr. Bliss played a pioneering role in the team that developed the Optacon, electromechanical device that enables blind people to read printed material that has not been transcribed into Braille. Dr. Bliss also pioneered the Versabraille computer, Speech-Plus talking calculator, Vista screen enlargement systems, Versapoint Braille printer, OsCar optical character recognition system, and a successful family of closed circuit television viewing systems (CCTVs). Most recently his research on reading technologies for people with low vision has led to the production of the Versatile Image Processor (VIP).   

He was the Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford and Manager of the Bioinformation Systems Group at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
Dr. Bliss holds a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and the Doctorate in Circuit Theory from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).