Panel 1: Coding the Future

Anne Aaron is Senior Director of Encoding Tech at Netflix. She leads the organization that develops media processing for VOD, Ads, Cloud Gaming and Studio. Her team is also responsible for broadcast, encoding and operations for Netflix Live shows.

Anne is originally from Manila, Philippines and holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. Anne was recognized by Forbes as one of America’s Top 50 Women In Tech in 2018 and received the Workflow Medal from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers in 2019. In 2021, her team received two Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for video encoding and quality metrics. When she is not hanging out with family, she tries to catch up on the latest shows on Netflix.

Shan Liu (Fellow, IEEE) received her B.E. degree from Tsinghua University and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from University of Southern California. She held senior technical and management positions at Sony, MERL, MediaTek, etc. and is now a Distinguished Scientist and General Manager at Tencent. She is the author of 150+ peer-reviewed papers, 200+ standard essential patents, one book and recipient of many awards, including IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Industrial Pioneer Award (2026), IEEE SA Standards Medallion (2025), ISO/IEC Excellence Award (2024), USC SIPI Distinguished Alumni Award (2023), Technology Lumiere Award (2022) and IEEE TCSVT Best AE Awards (2020, 2019). She has served as General Chair and Area Chair for many international conferences, as well as on multiple boards and committees. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, Chair of AOMedia VVM Working Group, Chair of IEEE C/DC 3366 Working Group and Vice Chair of IEEE SA Data Compression Standards Committee. Her research focuses on compression, intelligence and systems of audio-visual, volumetric and immersive multimedia.

Andrey Norkin is a Principal Architect at NVIDIA, where he works on video compression technologies spanning conventional and ML-based approaches. He also serves as co-Chair of the Video Codec Working Group of the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), where he co-led the development of AV2, the organization’s most recent video codec specification.

Between 2015 and 2025, Andrey was with Netflix. His work focused on encoding technologies for over-the-top (OTT) video streaming, High Dynamic Range (HDR) video processing, and emerging approaches to video compression. Before joining Netflix, he worked at Ericsson in Sweden, from 2008 to 2015, conducting research and leading projects in video compression and 3D video. He also contributed to the development of hardware video encoders for broadcast applications at Ericsson TV, now MediaKind, in Southampton, UK.

Andrey contributed to video coding standardization within ITU-T and MPEG, particularly to the development of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) with multiple adopted technical proposals and coordination of work in certain areas including deblocking filtering. He also played an active role in AOMedia’s development of the AV1 video codec and received a 2025 Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for his contributions to the AV1 specification.

Andrey holds a Doctor of Science degree in Signal Processing from Tampere University of Technology, Finland.

Justin Ridge has been with Nokia for over 25 years and is currently a Principal Engineer in Nokia’s Video Coding Systems Research group. He’s been involved in video codec standardization for most of that time (since H.264/AVC days) and is currently a vice-chair of ITU-T Study Group 21 where he also co-chairs Working Party 3 (one of the JVET parent bodies).  He is also the President of the Media Coding Industry Forum (MC-IF).

Dr. Elena Alshina is Chief Video Scientist, Audiovisual Technology Lab Director, Media Codec technology Lab Director in Huawei Technologies. She got Master degree in Physics from Moscow State University in 1995 and PhD in Computer Science and Mathematical Modelling from Russian Academy of Science in 1998. Her field of interest includes but not limited to Mathematical modelling; Video and Image compression and processing, neural network-based algorithms development. Though her carrier Elena was working both in academia and industry: Senior Researcher Russian Academy of Science (Institute for Mathematical Modelling) 1998~2006, Associate Professor National Research University of Electronic Technology, Principal Engineer Samsung Electronics 2006 (Moscow), 2007~2018 (Suwon/Seoul), Chief Video Scientist Huawei Technologies (Munich) 2018- present. Elena is an active participant of video codec standardization (HEVC/H.265, VVC/H.266 projects). Along with Prof. João Ascenso she is JPEG AI standardization project chair and editor.