Steven Simske

CT/Director/HP Fellow, Hewlett-Packard Labs, Secure Document Lifecycle

Steve Simske is a Fellow in HP Labs, where he is the Director and Chief Technologist for the Document Lifecycle portfolio. This research supports the Imaging and Printing Group (IPG), Enterprise Business and Software teams, and Global Security Operations. Steve spent his first five years at HP in the Imaging and Printing Group, where he worked on image processing, image analysis and document understanding technologies that were later incorporated into HP Labs projects for automatic book digitization, document understanding, speech recognition and other classification and analytics programs. In developing these technologies, the toolset for architecting massive intelligent systems was honed—now known as meta-algorithmics—affording the combination of two or more intelligent systems to create more robust, accurate and often faster larger systems, or “ecosystems”.In Labs, Steve later worked on medical signal processing for portable medicine, including novel means of reducing biological noise in electrocardiograms (ECGs). Steve was then given the opportunity to create the Security Printing and Imaging program within HP. This research incorporates image analysis, security, analytics and forensics to prevent counterfeiting, protect branded products, and provide investigative support for anti-fraud. Much of this work has been taken forward to supply chain analytics, dynamic biometrics and secure document lifecycle, which are Steve’s current focuses. As of 2010, Steve has roughly 40 US Patents and more than 250 peer-reviewed publications. He is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Illicit Trade, a participant in several GS1 standards committees, and an IS&T Fellow.Before HP, Steve received his BS (Biomedical Engineering) from Marquette University, his MS (Biomedical Engineering) from Rensselaer Polytechnic University, and his PhD (Electrical Engineering) and PostDoc (Aerospace Engineering) from the University of Colorado. Steve has been on the faculty at the University of Colorado, Regis University, Colorado School of Mines, and Colorado State University. He has designed and developed animal life support hardware, performed experiments on a dozen US Space Shuttle missions, written the first optimal reconstruction system for impedance tomography, and co-invented “lifetime” orthopaedic implants. He has mentored more than 30 graduate students, many of whom are now professors at major universities.Steve has been fortunate to work for and with some of the world’s most creative and intelligent people over the years. This extends to his home, where his wife of 20 years, Teresa, also an engineer with an advanced degree, and two wonderful sons, Kieran and Dallen, keep him happy, busy, and honest. Steve loves hiking, soccer, hockey, fencing, piano, travel (he’d better—he’s lived in 10 US States!), languages and reading.