Yaowu Xu
Senior Director Of Engineering at University of Rochester
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolYaowu Xu is a senior technology leader with 16+ years building codecs, media formats, and AI-driven platforms, now serving as Senior Director of Engineering at Google where he leads a cross-company effort between Chrome, DeepMind, and Cloud to bring AI features to billions of users. He previously drove foundational open media technologies as Distinguished Engineer—authoring and evolving VP9, AV1/AV2, Lyra, WebP/AVIF, IAMF and Draco—and before that led codec development at On2, shipping VP3 through VP8. A hands-on optimizer, he has contributed low-level SSE2/SSSE3 assembly improvements and rate-control enhancements to libvpx’s VP9/VP10 encoder, fixing memory and type bugs to boost encoding performance. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he combines deep academic training in engineering with product-scale execution and serves on the University of Rochester board of advisors, blending research rigor with large-scale deployment experience.
16 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Electrical and Computer Engineering, PhD Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of RochesterPhD Nuclear Engineering, PhD Nuclear Engineering at Tsinghua University
Github Skills (15)
c1710
algorithm10
numerical-optimization10
code-optimization10
algorithms10
vp910
video-encoding10
c1110
optimisation10
optimization10
digital-signal-processing9
c-language8
data-structures8
data-structure8
cprogramming-language8
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
webmproject/libvpx
May 2010 - Aug 2022
Mirror only. Please do not send pull requests.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Low-Level Optimization
Back-end Developer & Low-Level OptimizationContributions:1857 commits in 12 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Yaowu's contributions center on low-level optimization efforts and enhancements to the VP9 and VP10 encoder, a component of the libvpx project. Their work includes the implementation and refinement of efficient algorithms, specifically for the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and inverse Walsh-Hadamard transform (IHT), in both SSE2 and SSSE3 assembly, resulting in improved performance. Further modifications included adding parameter controls related to rate control and the handling of color space information, which enhanced overall encoding efficiency and fidelity. The user addressed potential errors from out of bounds memory writes and type conversion bugs, showcasing proficiency in optimization and error handling.
pull-requests
luctrudeau/libaom
Aug 2017 - Jun 2018
Contributions:273 commits in 10 months
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