American computer scientist and inventor of the GIF image format Stephen Wellheit
According to NBC, Stephen Wellhead, an American computer scientist and inventor of the GIF image format, died on March 14, local time, at the age of 74. His wife, Catherine, confirmed that he died of COVID-19. In 1987, he created the Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) to compress images, and in 2012, GIFs were named Vocabulary of the Year by the Oxford American Dictionary. Willhead received the Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for inventing the GIF.

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Source: China News Network