Iwan Setyawan was born in the early 1970’s in Semarang, Indonesia. He spent most of his childhood, and the first part of his education, in Salatiga — a cool (well, it was cool then) town some 45 kilometers south of Semarang.
After graduating from high school (SMA 1 Salatiga) he went to Bandung to study Electrical Engineering at the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), majoring in Computer Engineering. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in 1996. His Final Project was “Sound-based recognition of Musical Instruments using Artificial Neural Networks” (basically, he tried to teach computers to tell what musical instrument is being played based on what the computer is hearing).
He then continued working for a Master’s degree, also in ITB. He still studied Electrical Engineering but this time he was majoring in Information Systems. His Master’s thesis was “Low bit-rate video coding using a modified H.263 codec”. He earned his Master’s degree in 1999.
Later that same year he packed his suitcase to go to a faraway land, The Netherlands, to work for his Ph.D degree. He did his research in the Infromatie- en Communicatie Theorie Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Technische Universiteit Delft. His Ph.D thesis was “Geometric Distortion in Image and Video Watermarking: Robustness and Visual Quality Impact”. He earned his Ph.D in 2004.
Currently, he is living in Semarang and working as an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Satya Wacana Christian University. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE. Dr. Setyawan is a United Board for Christian Higher Educations in Asia (UBCHEA) Fellow (class of 2014). As a United Board Fellow, he spent the Spring of 2015 as a visiting scholar at the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tunghai University, Taiwan. He then spent the Spring of 2016 as a visiting scholar at the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Baylor University, Texas, U.S.A.
When not busy teaching or doing research, Dr. Setyawan loves to pretend himself an ace pilot or a general plotting brilliant tactical moves.
A more formal version of Dr. Setyawan’s CV, nicely typeset using LaTeX, can be downloaded here. (A version of the CV, in Bahasa Indonesia with some additional information, is available here.)