
2025
IEEE INNOVATION IN SOCIETAL INFRASTRUCTURE AWARD
Sponsored by Hitachi Ltd. and the IEEE Computer Society
“For contributions to and leadership in high-performance AI computing infrastructure and efficient video encoding.”
Video coding aims to compress video content to a fraction of tens to hundreds. Standards for video codec (encoder/decoder) are the key to industrial production. But in practice, the cost of unfriendly patents in standards becomes a barrier. Wen Gao proposed a new standard paradigm to minimize the impact of such unfriendly patents and founded the AVS group to develop efficient video coding standards. Now, billions of AVS codecs are utilized worldwide. More recently, Gao simultaneously focuses on initiatives for large-scale AI applications. He designed a low-delay and high-reliable AI cluster and established China’s first exascale AI supercomputer, which is accessible to the R&D community, enabling thousands of developers to build their AI-based systems.
An IEEE Fellow, Gao is Chair Professor, Peking University, Beijing, China, and Founding Director of Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China.