As a company of inventors, InterDigital’s Inventor of the Year Award recognizes more than technical excellence, it celebrates the spirit of innovation that drives technological progress. This year, InterDigital recognized two engineers for their groundbreaking contributions shaping the future of wireless communications and video technology.
Philippe Bordes and Martino Freda are two outstanding inventors who exemplify the spirit of innovation, continuously pushing boundaries to advance wireless and video capabilities, while mentoring and inspiring future generations of inventors. As our technologies advance and evolve, these inventors ensure InterDigital remains at the forefront of change, ensuring our innovation today empowers exciting opportunities tomorrow.
Philippe Bordes: Advancing Compression in a Video-First World
Philippe Bordes, Principal Scientist based in InterDigital’s Video Lab in Rennes, has spent much of his esteemed career shaping and advancing video compression capabilities. Since joining Technicolor R&I (later acquired by InterDigital) in 1990, Philippe’s prolific inventions have shaped cutting-edge video coding tools and technologies like Blue-ray, and his advocacy has advanced the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standards and extensions.
Among Philippe’s notable achievements is Referral Picture Rescaling (RPR), a technique that adjusts video resolution based on available bandwidth. His innovation enables dynamic picture rescaling to ensure smooth playback and efficient data usage by encoding smaller images when bandwidth is limited and full-size images when network capacity allows. As global video consumption grows and expands across industries, innovations like these maintain the quality of content and experience while achieving gains in efficiency and bandwidth.
As a career inventor, Philippe takes great pride in seeing his innovations embraced by industry and his peers, “because it means that you have been recognized to have produced something that is useful and efficient.”
Looking towards the future, Philippe sees artificial intelligence (AI) as an exciting and powerful tool for innovation and recognizes the importance of balancing large-scale AI systems with smaller, energy-efficient networks. In the age of AI, Philippe believes in the essential value of ingenuity to solve complex problems and encourages the next generation of inventors to “not be afraid to bring their own originality,” while leaving room to learn from experts and balance new ideas with established wisdom.
Martino Freda: Shaping the Evolution of Wireless Connectivity
Since joining InterDigital in 2006, Martino Freda has been instrumental in advancing wireless communication technologies through transformational inventions and significant contributions to 3GPP standards. As a Principal Engineer in InterDigital’s Wireless Standards Lab in Montreal, Martino has spent much of his career researching future-looking technologies and innovation that enhances bandwidth management, device-to-device communication, and mobility, and enhanced capabilities for IoT.
Martino’s innovation and expertise have fueled the evolution from 4G to 5G, and he continues to be an advocate for the best technology capabilities in the transition to 6G. Martino’s innovation expertise includes inventions that improve the efficiency and reliability of device communication with networks, to enable applications with high data rates like video, and more recently, XR.
Guided by a love of problem solving, Martino began his career as a software engineer and bolstered his experience with standards expertise to develop and contribute meaningful solutions for device connectivity. As a 3GPP delegate and contributor, Martino is influential in shaping standards that will deepen communication between devices and empower AI and XR technologies to fuel new enterprise solutions, services, and more.
Innovation depends on ingenuity, persistence and a strong work ethic, and Martino reminds aspiring inventors that “hard work is the basis for any form of success.” He believes that “resilience in the face of obstacles is essential for overcoming challenges and finding solutions,” and that innovation will continue to influence and advance wireless capabilities for the future.
The inventions and innovation led by InterDigital inventors enhance our lives, unlock new services, and underpin new and exciting ways to connect. Congratulations to our Inventors of the Year, Martino Freda and Philippe Bordes, for their outstanding work and lasting impact!