Founders

Sassan Pejhan, President

Sassan Pejhan has been actively involved in digital image processing and IP networks for the past 20 years. His experience includes academic and industrial research, commercial product design and development, conducting technical courses and workshops for clients in industry, training field engineers and customer support staff, evaluating intellectual property as well as advising senior management on technology strategies and product roadmaps.

Prior to co-founding Avixel, Sassan headed advanced video development at VBrick Systems, a developer of networked audiovisual appliances. He obtained $600,000 in research grants from the National Science Foundation to lead a team of engineers to develop video compression algorithms and productize them on a multi-DSP platform for a real-time, high-definition H.264 encoder. Sassan was the architect on adding NTSC Line 21 (Closed Captioning) support to the MPEG-4 product suite. He standardized this technology by serving as Chair and Editor of the Closed Captioning task force of the Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA).

Prior to joining VBrick in 2002, Sassan was the lead technologist at Sorceron, a developer of multimedia authoring and distribution software. He led research and development on texture compression and video segmentation. This work was partly funded by research grants from NASA and the NSF that Sassan co-authored. He also performed technical due diligence for the CEO during negotiations with strategic partners and vendors.

Sassan spent four years at Sarnoff Corporation (formerly RCA Labs), where he developed MPEG-4 related multimedia authoring tools and video streaming applications. He was also responsible for licensing Sarnoff's MPEG-4 technology. He worked at Eastman Kodak, where he conducted R&D work on efficient image transmission over the Internet, and Citicorp, where he completed the 2-year Management Associate Development Program.

Sassan holds doctorate and master degrees in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Imperial College of Science and Technology (London University). He has authored numerous technical papers, patent applications and white papers. He has also taught technical courses to clients in industry, including Telecom Malaysia.

Miroslaw Kalinowski, CTO

Miroslaw (Mirek) Kalinowski has more than 15 years of experience in development of software and hardware systems. His areas of expertise include: systems design, performance analysis and algorithm development. Prior to co-founding Avixel, he was a senior software engineer at a start-up company, where he was in charge of integration of speech recognition technology into a distributed (web based) application.

Mirek spent over five years of his career at Sarnoff Corporation (former RCA Labs) working on research and development projects for several high profile clients. He architected an on-board satellite switch for Lockheed Martin. He developed a performance model and a microcode compiler for an MPEG decoder for Motorola. He built a visualization system for the US Navy.

Mirek holds a PhD in Computer Science from The City University of New York (CUNY) and two MSc degrees, in Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, from Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland. He has authored several scientific and technical papers and received a U.S. patent for his work on network protocols. Mirek taught several computer science courses at Hunter College.