About the Author

Edward Schwalb received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Irvine in 1998 and his B.Sc. in Computer Science and Physics from Bar-Ilan University in 1991. He has more than 15 years of industrial experience, performing on assignments that range from programming and managing small software development efforts to managing the maintenance of large networks and supervising dozens of employees .

Back in the 1980s, as a high school student, he used the Apple IIe to develop an award-winning monopoly game and received a Weitzman Institute excellence award for the development of an animation framework (similar to today's Macromedia Flash). While still in high school, Edward ”as a member of a team focused on early detection of malignant diseases ”developed a controller and data analysis platform for the Physics Department of Bar Ilan University. The platform, which was based on Apple IIe, proved irreplaceable for a period of five years; it was eventually replaced by a PC platform. Later, he acted as a proprietor of a small business devoted to developing hardware and software prototypes for various industries, such as the Israeli aircraft industry, semiconductor industry, and banking industry; his major clients included Tadiran, TAAS, and Bank Discount. The projects involved prototype development, micro-controller programming, account management software development, and maintenance.

In 1991 he arrived Orange County, California, for graduate studies in Artificial Intelligence. He became an expert in temporal constraint processing and developed novel constraint processing techniques. His publications in the Proceedings of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence , the Constraints Journal , and Artificial Intelligence Journal introduced new algorithms for reasoning with constraints that improved on traditional methods by orders of magnitude.

After completing his doctorate, Edward founded Schwalb Research, through which he worked on numerous projects, including the development of unique dimensioning and sketching capabilities into a sheet metal CAD, software tools for the management and visualization of millions of product key characteristics, collaboration with Stanford Medical Informatics on interpretation and visualization of clinical data, and battle space infosphere publish “subscribe middleware.

While working with Sharp Laboratories of America, Inc., (SLA), Edward was tasked with understanding interactive TV standards, helping guide SLA's development; this culminated in the filing of a number of patents. He was further tasked with representing SLA's interests in standardization organizations through very active participation in a number of standardization efforts. These efforts resulted in several approved standards: ATSC A93 Synchronized/Asynchronous Trigger Standard, ATSC A95 Data Application Reference Model, ATSC A95 Transport Stream File System Standard, ATSC A95, ATSC A100 DTV Application Software Environment “Level 1 (DASE-1), and ANSI/SCTE80 In-Band Data Broadcast Standard. This active participation gave rise to this book.