Waterloo spin-off company wins second Emmy award

Thursday, February 4, 2021

Zhou Wang headshot
A spin-off company with deep roots at the University of Waterloo has won a second Emmy Award for its work to improve the quality and reduce the costs of video.

SSIMWAVE, based in Waterloo, was founded in 2013 by Zhou Wang, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Abdul Rehman and Kai Zeng, who both earned their doctorates at Waterloo the same year.

Professor Wang, the chief science officer of the company, also won an Emmy in 2015 for his groundbreaking work on technology to measure the quality of video provided by television and streaming companies as it is seen by viewers.

The latest award, which is scheduled to be presented at a virtual Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards Ceremony in October, recognizes the development of perceptual metrics for video encoding optimization.

“In just the few years since Dr. Wang was awarded an Emmy Award for SSIM, the team behind SSIMPLUS and now our Video Quality Dial has significantly advanced the science of video quality measurement, and encoding optimization,” Rehman, CEO and CTO of the company, said in a media release.