Jyrki Alakuijala
Technical Lead Manager At Google Research
Wollerau, Schwyz, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJyrki Alakuijala is a Technical Lead Manager at Google Research with 15+ years of experience designing codecs, compression and hashing algorithms that power the modern web. He co-designed Brotli—used to compress roughly a third of web content—and has contributed core improvements to high-profile open-source projects like JPEG XL and butteraugli, focusing on perceptual quality and encoding performance. His career spans research-driven product engineering from medical imaging and IMRT optimization to mobile game AI, reflecting deep expertise in signal processing and applied algorithms. Based in Switzerland and holding a Dr.Tech. from the University of Oulu, he blends academic rigor with production-grade optimization and a knack for turning psychoacoustic and psychovisual insights into practical compression wins.
15 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Dr.Tech., Dr.Tech. at The University of Oulu
Github Skills (14)
algorithm10
data-structures10
algorithms10
c-language10
jpeg-xl10
cprogramming-language10
data-structure10
image-processing10
image-compression10
encoder9
encode9
computer-vision9
decoder8
decode8
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
google/butteraugli
Feb 2016 - Jun 2018
butteraugli estimates the psychovisual difference between two images
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 commits, 11 PRs, 15 pushes in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Jyrki primarily contributed to the core logic of the butteraugli project, focusing on color model refinements and psychovisual model updates. Their work involved significant changes to the `butteraugli.cc` and `butteraugli_main.cc` files, implementing and optimizing algorithms related to image processing. These changes likely improved the accuracy and efficiency of the image comparison and visual difference estimation capabilities of the project.
difference-betweenimage-processingimageestimates
libjxl/libjxl
Jun 2021 - Jan 2023
JPEG XL image format reference implementation
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:181 reviews, 45 commits, 179 PRs in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Jyrki primarily contributed to the optimization of the JPEG XL image format reference implementation, focusing on improving the performance of the encoding process. Their work involved modifying heuristics for the AC strategy, specifically reversing the decision tree and fine-tuning parameters related to color handling and visual masking, to reduce ringing and enhance image fidelity. These changes led to improvements in BPP*pnorm and the overall quality of the compressed images. The user also worked on balancing the decisions related to the different transforms used in the encoding process.
lossless-image-compressionjpegimagelossless-compression-algorithmpsd
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