One of the most prestigious organizations for advancing the knowledge of color in the arts and industry has honored Harold Van Aken for his work in developing the NetProfiler® technology that precisely and remotely calibrates color measurement instruments at sites anywhere in the world.
The Inter-Society Color Council, a Reston, Va.-based professional organization founded in 1931 to stimulate work in the field of color science, gave Van Aken its 2008 Macbeth Award on Sept. 15 at its annual meeting in Baltimore for his outstanding contribution to the field of color technology.
The award has been given out on even numbered years since 1972 when it was established by Norman Macbeth, Jr in memory of his father, Norman Macbeth, who developed a lighting system in 1915 to simulate daylight and founded the Macbeth Artificial Daylighting Company in New York.
“When I look over the past recipients of this award, I am greatly honored,” Van Aken, 64, said. “Particularly so because I come from the industrial or applied side of color science, and past winners have largely come from the theoretical side. It’s very gratifying to see that my work has been appreciated for its overall contribution to the advancement of color science.”
At the award ceremony, Van Aken was lauded for conceiving and developing the NetProlifer technology that allows companies to perform calibration tests of color measurement instruments at remote locations, then communicate the data to a central host computer where intensive statistical analysis can be performed by a larger, more capable processor. NetProfiler, a product of X-Rite Incorporated, essentially correlates the readings of instruments to the degree that they form an extremely reliable data network. The practical result is that companies save time and money through NetProfiler because their instruments can reliably substitute data for physical specimens during the customer approval process. For instance, dyehouses around the globe saved thousands of man-hours of work and millions of dollars last year through the use of digital sampling.
The author of 18 patents in the field of color science, Van Aken has worked throughout his career in various capacities for Kollmorgen Corporation, Macbeth L.L.C., GretagMacbeth L.L.C. and X-Rite.
