Alumnus of the month - June 2009
Kenneth Jones
Postgraduate Diploma in Information Systems Engineering, 1989
Kenneth obtained a post graduate diploma in Information Systems Engineering at South Bank University in 1989.
Kenneth is thankful to South Bank, for empowering him, enabling him to complete his Open University Master of Engineering degree, and to gain membership to the Institute of Physics.
During the time that England was under a state of national emergency due to the mid-October Great Gale disaster, Kenneth following a fall was left with a permanent spinal injury to the neck vertebra.
As a qualified engineer at the BBC in national radio broadcasting, Kenneth studied to obtain an Open University degree and continue towards his research project prior to the tragic end of his regular paid employment.
Kenneth had an innovative design idea for a signal compression method of the digital TV channel network for the newly developing digital studio technique that was prevalent at the International Broadcasting Convention display of 1988 at Brighton front.
The earlier registration for the successful Information Systems Engineering course with the specialist data communications systems study towards masters’ level gave Kenneth knowledge, skills and insight.
After much hard work for the post-graduate diploma, bar a successful resit examination due to temporary further illness, he gained research training with Philips Research Laboratories at Redhill in Surrey.
The advanced research 1989 placement within the Informatics Division was in the Image Processing and Display Group under Group Manager, later director, Peter Saraga. Kenneth was able to give direction to and collaboratively construct the planned video compression design.
The few months intensive laboratory program writing of the major project proved successful in coding and reducing video frame picture images to a four classification binary network.
The invention proof of the discovery was partially imitated globally to attract a field of interest from the USA, Russia, the rest of the EU supporting the Eureka EU-95 video development programme, and eventually Korea.
In twenty years by the innovation and evolution of Kenneth’s programme his influence has impacted on the modern standards of HDTV and Blue ray.
Kenneth’s scientific endeavours resulted in International Electrotechnical Committee coding standard for British Standard MPEG video in a variety of system implementations. He has two further patents pending the last one being in parallel to the House of Commons Engineering Enquiry into plastic electronic engineering, which is said to be a harsh technology.
Kenneth states that ‘the commercial and national exploitation has adaptively diversified into terrestrial, satellite and cable television broadcasting, to vastly reduce power consumption, enable miniaturisation, lightweight digital large screens and miniature displays. This will be to a great significance with the digital switchover under way for the 2012 completion and the closedown of the power greedy analogue TV technique’.