Earl Levine was one of the technical leaders in the fields of streaming media, data compression, and audio watermarking technologies during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and onward, winning the prestigious Capocelli Prize for data compression in 1997.[1][2]
His PhD work at Stanford University was early in the field of artificial intelligence, creating vector quantized autoencoder convolutional neural networks.[3] He then invented the lossless audio codec method used in Apple Lossless Codec and FLAC, used to create the largest collection of lossless audio at the time.[4][5][6][7][8] He worked at VXtreme until its acquisition by Microsoft. Following that he worked for Liquid Audio. Liquid Audio's patent portfolio, almost all of which he invented or co-invented, was acquired by Microsoft in 2002.[9]
He is also known for his successful hobby of training race horses including Fleet Crossing who won the Churchill Downs, MSW [10][11]
He established one of the first shared neighborhood wi-fi systems in 2002 [12]