Prof. Dick Bulterman has been appointed CWI Fellow per 1 July 2016. This distinction is given to prominent researchers at CWI for their contribution to CWI's research and administration. Bulterman is member of the Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) group at CWI, which he headed from 2002 to 2014. He is also part-time professor of Distributed Multimedia Languages and Interfaces at the VU University Amsterdam. Internationally, he serves as the Chair of ACM's SIGWEB special interest group.
Bulterman’s research interests are multimedia authoring and document processing. His recent research concerns socially-aware multimedia, interactive television, and media analysis. He studies models and systems for supporting the capture, transfer and rendering of time-sensitive data across heterogeneous infrastructures. This includes the development of active interfaces for rich social networking systems, the integration of sensor-based data from the 'internet of things', the modeling of high-level semantic properties of content, and the development of rendering architectures that allow application-driven, time-constrained synchronization of user interaction across wide area networks. This work has resulted in over 250 academic and technical publications, two well-received books, several major open-source software publications, and numerous invitations for keynote addresses.
Prior to joining CWI in 1988, Bulterman received a PhD in computer science at Brown University (USA) and held faculty appointments at Brown University, TU Delft and the University of Utrecht. At CWI, he headed the Computer Systems and Telematics department at CWI from 1988 to 1994, where he was one of the pioneers in the earliest days of the Internet in the Netherlands. Later, he headed the Multimedia and Human Computer Interaction group from 1994 to 1998. In 1998, he was the founder of the CWI spin-off company Oratrix Development BV. In 2002, he rejoined CWI, where he became group leader of the Distributed and Interactive Systems group. After a nearly three years as CEO of FXPAL in Palo Alto (USA), he rejoined CWI for a second time in 2016.
Bulterman has worked on over a dozen European and US research projects in the past 25 years. He was chair of the W3C Synchronized Multimedia working group from 2004-2012, where he was an advocate of international Web standards for multimedia authoring and presentation (SMIL). He is on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Multimedia and has been associate editor of the ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal and Multimedia Tools and Applications. Bulterman is a member of Sigma Xi, the ACM and the IEEE. In 2013, he received the prestiguous ACM SIGMM Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications.
Bulterman can be reached at Dick.Bulterman@cwi.nl
