Gary Joseph Sullivan (born 1960) is an American electrical engineer who led the development of the AVC , HEVC , and VVC video coding standards and created the DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) API / DDI video decoding feature of the Microsoft Windows operating system.
He was the chairman and a co-founder of the Joint Video Team (JVT) standardization committee that developed the H.264/AVC standard, and he personally edited large portions of it. In January 2010, he became a founding co-chairman of the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding ( JCT-VC ) and an editor for developing the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. In October 2015, he became a founding co-chairman of the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET) that developed the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard
Sullivan was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky , and attended the Ascension and St. Margaret Mary elementary schools and Trinity High School , graduating in 1978. [1] He received B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Louisville J. B. Speed School of Engineering , Kentucky, in 1982 and 1983, respectively. [2] He received Ph.D. and Engineer degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles , in 1991.