After receiving a classical
high school education at the
Liceo Salesiano Valsalice in Turin, he earned a
master's degree in
electronic engineering at the
Polytechnic University of Turin in 1967, then obtained a
Ph.D. degree at the
University of Tokyo in 1973, where he also learned to speak Japanese. Chiariglione speaks five languages, including English and French. From March 1971 until July 2003, he was with
CSELT, the corporate research center of the
Telecom Italia group. His final position there was vice president, multimedia, at Telecom Italia Lab, the new name given to CSELT in 2001. The initiative for which he is best known started in 1988, when he originated the
ISO/
IEC standardization activity known as
MPEG (or Moving Picture Experts Group) (originally ISO TC 97/SC 2/WG 8, later
ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 29/WG 11), of which he was the Convenor (chairman) from its start until June 2020. This group, with a membership of over 300 experts, representing 20 countries and various industries having a stake in digital audio and video, produced the
MPEG-1 and
MPEG-2 standards that facilitated the emergence of
digital audio-visual media. He has led a number of European collaborative projects: • IVICO – a
RACE project investigating cost-effective integrated video codecs • COMIS – an
ESPRIT project supporting the development of the MPEG-1 standard • EU 625 VADIS – a
EUREKA project aiming at developing a European hardware and software technology for the MPEG-2 standard He also initiated other efforts to define internationally agreed technical specifications, such as DAVIC (the Digital Audio-Visual Council) in 1994 and
FIPA (the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) in 1996. In 1999, he became the Executive Director of
SDMI (the Secure Digital Music Initiative), a forum comprising hundreds of companies with the goal to develop specifications for an
open standard for secure
digital music delivery technology. He stepped down from this post in 2001, having expressed frustration about conflicts between the members of the group, which had failed to produce effective anti-piracy specifications. He is currently CEO of cedeo.net. ==Awards and honors==