Overview of Ricoh’s California Research Center

June 25, 2008
John Barrus | Director, California Research Center - Ricoh Innovations, Inc.

Barrus will present an overview of RII’s California Research Center its origins, research capability, and how CRC fits in with Ricoh Company, Ltd. in Japan. CRC works in a variety of research areas, including multimedia document analysis, hardware, optics, image processing and business workflow. CRC created the world’s fastest JPG compression and was instrumental in creating the J2K standard. Several examples of current and past research will be presented, along with demos and videos.

Speaker Details

John Barrus’ formal education is in mechanical engineering—product design, embedded systems, and MCAD. He started his first company while he was a Ph.D. student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, after graduating, became a research scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs and a lecturer at MIT. At MERL he led a team that built one of the early predecessors to MMORPG’s—a large-scale, extensible, distributed virtual environment called Diamond Park. After MERL, he moved to California where he started two more companies (3D content management, wireless digital photography) before returning to research at Ricoh Innovations, Inc. in 1999. His initial work at RII was on multimedia communication tools and hardware. In April, he became the director of Ricoh’s California Research Center.