Lawrence A. Rowe (born April 11, 1948) is a computer scientist who was a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley from 1976 to 2003. He is still actively involved in multimedia research projects involving streaming media, distributed collaboration, teaching and learning, and database management systems and tools. He taught classes on multimedia systems and applications, user interfaces, programming languages and compilers, and computer programming. He joined FX Palo Alto Laboratories (FXPAL) as President in 2007 and was promoted to Chairman & CEO in 2013.
Rowe was the founding director of the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center (BMRC), which was created in 1995 to explore the application of multimedia technology to education and research. BMRC taught classes on multimedia authoring, established and operated authoring studios and distributed collaboration and distance learning rooms and services, and provided advice and technical support on a wide range of issues relating to multimedia authoring and distributed collaboration. A major BMRC accomplishment was the development and deployment of the Berkeley Webcasting System, which produces over 30 hours a week of Berkeley course lectures that are viewed over 300K times per month by people anywhere on the Internet. The BMRC research activies ended in 2003 due to a lack of funding and support. But the Berkeley Webcasting System is still being operated by the campus.
His past research interests have included development tools for database applications, distributed operating systems, computer networks (e.g., multicast protocols and applications), distributed streaming media toolkits, multimedia applications (e.g., Video-on-Demand, webcasting, videoconferencing, multimedia authoring, etc.), and computer-integrated manufacturing.
Personal history
editRowe, known as Larry Rowe, received a BA degree in Mathematics and a PhD in Information and Computer Science from the University of California at Irvine in 1970 and 1976, respectively. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), past chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (1998-2003), a member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), and served on many governmental advisory committees. He was a co-founder of the original Ingres Corporation (1980-1990) and NCast Corporation.