Jan van der Meer
Jan van der Meer is a retired Philips employee. During his career within Philips, Jan played a leading role in the MPEG standards committee almost from its very beginning and contributed to the developments of the MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 standards. In MPEG, Jan's main focus was to ensure that the MPEG audio and video compression standards can be suitably used in digital television, DVD, and BluRay applications, in particular by specifying such usage in the MPEG-2 system standard. Currently, Jan is a principal consultant.
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In general, Jan is more intrigued by making things work than by basic research. However, sometimes it is fun to investigate whether further research makes sense; see the story below on a duck looking for food.
One of the major features of living in the Netherlands is that you can use your bicycle for commuting to your office. On an early morning, when cycling through the countryside to his office, Jan encountered a duck in a ditch next to the bicycle road. The duck was looking for food below water, like the duck in the picture. Jan wondered whether the duck with his head below the water surface could hear anything in this position and decided to investigate this. Therefore, when passing the duck, he produced a thunderous yell: "Hello...!!". Probably, one never saw a duck reacting so quickly. In no time, the duck turned around to desperately fly away from this terrifying place as fast as possible - poor duck. As far as known, the duck never came back. Anyway, the result was obvious: no need for further research, and so Jan decided to continue his effort on solving all kinds of more practical problems.