Stephen R SmootStephen R. Smoot, Ph.D., helped start up Riverbed Technology in February 2003, and currently serves as senior vice president of technical operations, running the technical support, technical publications, technical marketing, and global consulting enineering groups. He spends his time thinking about where technology is going and helping customers to solve their problems. Smoot previously worked on acceleration and video at Inktomi Corporation (now a part of Yahoo). He joined Inktomi, following its acquisition of FastForward Networks, which designed overlay network technology for streaming video with millions of viewers over the Internet. Smoot previously worked at Imedia (Motorola), Honeywell, and IBM. Smoot received his doctorate in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley, working with Lawrence Rowe. His dissertation, "Maximizing Perceived Quality at Given Bit-Rates in MPEG Encoding," describes various aspects of creating MPEG video from its original video source. He also holds a master's degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. His undergraduate education was at MIT where he received bachelor's degrees in computer science and mathematics. Read More Read Less