Dr. Curtis R. Carlson
President & CEO
SRI International, Inc.
Curtis R. Carlson became president and CEO of SRI International in 1999. Previously, he spent more than 20 years with Sarnoff Corporation, a wholly owned SRI subsidiary.
In 1973, Carlson joined RCA Laboratories, which became part of SRI in 1987 as the Sarnoff Corporation. He started and helped lead the high-definition television (HDTV) program that became the U.S. standard and in 1997 his team won an Emmy Award for outstanding technical achievement for Sarnoff. In 2000 another team started and led by Carlson won an Emmy for Sarnoff for a system that optimizes satellite broadcast digital image quality.
As head of Ventures and Licensing at Sarnoff, he helped found more than 10 new companies. In 2007, Carlson was named Chairman of Sarnoff's Board of Directors.
Dr. Carlson is widely sought out as a speaker and thought leader on innovation and global competitiveness. He serves as co-chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Singapore National Research Foundation. He is a founding member of the Innovation Leadership Council for the World Economic Forum. He has been asked to be the chairman of the pending Nordic Innovation Prize. And recently he was selected to serve on President Obama's task force for research and development. He has also advised numerous U.S. Governors, Prime Ministers, Economic Ministers, and Education Ministers on innovation, competitiveness, and educational reform.
In 2006, Carlson won the Otto Schade Prize for Display Performance and Image Quality from the Society for Information Display with Dr. Roger Cohen. In 2007, Carlson was given the Medal of Excellence Award for Alumni Lifetime Achievement by Rutgers University's School of Engineering. Also in 2007, he was given the Herbert F. Taylor Alumni Award for Distinguished Service by Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). In 2002, he received the Dr. Robert H. Goddard Award from WPI for his professional achievements. Carlson was a visiting distinguished scientist at the University of Washington in 1998. He is also a Kobe ambassador for SRI's contributions to Kobe, Japan.
He has been on numerous public and private boards, including Nuance Communications (computer speech recognition), Pyramid Vision (computer vision), Sensar (iris biometric identification), and Sarif (LCD displays). He was a member of General Motors' Science and Technology Advisory Board.
Carlson has served on many government task forces, including the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, several National Research Laboratory Review Panels, the Galvin Naval Research Laboratory Review Panel, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory Technical Assessment Board, and the Defense Science Board task force on bio-chemical defense. He was a member of the original team that helped create the Army's Federated Laboratories. He was a founding member of the National Information Display Laboratory (NIDL) at Sarnoff, a new model for government-industry technology development and commercialization, which grew into the National Technology Alliance.
He has written a book with William Wilmot called Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want, published in 2006 by Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House. Innovation describes how SRI's unique process for innovation can be applied to all types of commercial and nonprofit enterprises, including the government. It was selected by Business Week as one of the Top Ten Business Books for 2006. The book forms the core of SRI's Five Disciplines of Innovation workshop that has been given to thousands of executives, managers, professors, government officials, and innovators around the world (e.g., the BBC, Philips Medical, Danish Radio and Television, ITRI, National Semiconductor, etc.)
Carlson received his B.S. in physics from WPI and was named in Who's Who Among Students. He is a member of Sigma Xi, and Tau Beta Pi. His M.S. and Ph.D. degrees are from Rutgers University. Carlson has published or presented numerous technical publications and holds fundamental patents in the fields of image quality, image coding, and computer vision.
In 2006, he received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In 2007 he received an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the Kettering Institute.
Carlson played the violin professionally at 15 and it remains his primary avocation. He is married to Dudley Brown Carlson, an award winning children's librarian.