Philips Research

Greg showed up at Philips Research in November 1992, where he worked as a contract system administrator for three years (SunOS, Solaris, Linux) while finishing his dissertation. In August 1995 he joined the same group as a full-time researcher, where he worked on projects ranging from an early Internet TV prototype to streaming graphics and virtual worlds (VRML and Active Worlds) to audio compression (MP3 and MPEG4 AAC), home networking, and even advanced user-interface concepts. (Life was good for Greg, you betcha.)

His operating system of choice is Linux, which is an incredibly reliable and powerful platform for all sorts of prototyping and development tasks. Of course, that doesn't mean Greg doesn't have to work on lesser platforms occasionally...but when the work absolutely, positively has to get done on time, you know where to go. (Current personal record: six months with a 2.0 SMP kernel before a power failure brought it down. Current no-holds-barred record: just over five years on a Cobalt Qube [June 1999 - June 2004] before a complete zippy turned off the UPS during a two-hour power failure. Current debate: install a first-person shooter on one of his home Linux boxes or continue getting Real Work done around the house?)

Initially called Philips Research Palo Alto--well, technically, it was originally called Philips Research Laboratories Sunnyvale; Greg joined during its second incarnation--the group briefly merged with the Philips Multimedia Center in early 1998 and then was reestablished as Philips Research Silicon Valley in October 1998. In June 1999, the entire site moved to a new Silicon Valley campus in Sunnyvale, California, only to be shut down for the third and final time two years later, during the economic downturn (a.k.a. "Internet crash").

After the shutdown, Greg was transferred to Philips' Semiconductors division, where he worked on embedded Linux for two different chips and on an interprocessor communications stack between a MIPS host and one or two TriMedia DSPs--all living on the same silicon. Greg left Philips to join Yahoo! in September 2004.

By the way, the image above was created by Greg's co-worker Pieter van der Meulen, who is also responsible for a few others (the cluster of four photos at the bottom). The image above has been out of date since March 1996, but after hanging around this page for so many years, it's practically family...