SMPTE Fellow

The Fellow Grade of membership is awarded to individuals who have, by proficiency and contributions, attained an outstanding rank among engineers or executives in the motion-picture, television, or related industries.

Paola Sunna joined the Centre for Research & Technology Innovation of RAI, the Italian public broadcaster, in 1997 after getting her degree in Electronic Engineering at Politecnico of Torino. She has worked on a wide variety of projects over the years spent at RAI, including: image processing, video coding, next generation video formats, multimodal user-interfaces, hybrid broadcast and broadband middleware, second screens apps, standards (DVB, MPEG, etc), HD/UHD, HDR workflows and 3D CG (Computer Graphics). In RAI she has led teams specializing in adopting new emerging technologies to improve the existing workflows and to validate new services for the end-users. Before leaving RAI (2017), she focused on intellectual property development for some of the topics she was working on. She got an MBA in 2005. In 2011, she won the Italian Prize for Innovation in Information Communication & Media Technology (ICMT) in the media-driven category. In 2015, she got a special mention as Best social innovation project for RightTVforKids at Start Cup Piemonte and Valle d'Aosta (Italy); she co-founded as CTO a startup to deploy RightTVforKids, an advanced system for parental control. In March 2017, she moved to the EBU Technology and Innovation Department as Senior Project Manager. At the EBU she looked after activities related to VR (Virtual reality)/AR (Augmented Reality) and personalised sound experiences with next generation audio codecs like MPEG-H and AC-4. From 2020 to 2022, she was the Technical Coordinator of the EU project 5G-RECORDS about 5G private networks for professional media content production. Currently, as Senior Technology and Innovation Manager (Eurovision Italy/EBU), she is focusing on advanced and emerging technologies for audio & video production workflows to produce immersive experiences and test new ways of content production including AI/generative AI. Her work includes state of art and market analysis, EBU Members and industry requirements collection for validation of emerging technologies through standardization gap analysis and pilots with Members, industry, universities and R&D centers.