Andrew J. Viterbi

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Andrew James Viterbi (born Andrea Giacomo Viterbo , born March 9, 1935 in Bergamo ) is an Italian-American electrical engineer and computer scientist . In 1967 he invented the Viterbi algorithm , which he did not patent at the time on the advice of a lawyer . B. is used in mobile communications .

life and work

Viterbi emigrated with his parents to the USA in 1939 as a Jew, attended school in Boston and then studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1952 , where he obtained his master's degree in 1957 .

He then worked at Raytheon and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on rocket and satellite controls via telemetry . He also received his PhD from the University of Southern California in 1962 . From 1963 he was an assistant professor at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

In 1967 he proposed the Viterbi algorithm for decoding convolutional codes in noisy channels. This was later used in hidden Markov models, among other things .

In 1969, together with his fellow professors Leonard Kleinrock from UCLA and Irving M. Jacobs from UCSD, he founded Linkabit in San Diego , which developed communications technology for the US military (forerunner of today's WANs ). In 1973 Viterbi switched entirely to Linkabit. In 1980 Linkabit was taken over by M / A COM in Burlington (Massachusetts) , which among other things developed digital modems for VSATs and encryption for pay-TV .

In 1985, Viterbi and Jacobs sold M / A COM in parts and founded Qualcomm instead . The new company developed satellite communication for trucks (OmniTRACS) with CDMA technologies, which were later also used in mobile communications. In 2000 Viterbi withdrew from the leadership of Qualcomm.

In the 2000s, he was president of the technology finance company The Viterbi Group .

Viterbi School of Engineering

After donating $ 52 million to the University of Southern California's engineering department , it was renamed the Erna and Andrew Viterbi School of Engineering in 2004 .

Viterbi serves on the Boards of Directors of the Scripps Institute and the University of Southern California.

He has three children with his wife Erna Finci.

Awards

Viterbi has been an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2001 and of the National Academy of Sciences since 1996 . For the Viterbi algorithm and his contributions to CDMA technology, he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2005 and the National Medal of Science in 2008 . He also received the IEEE Medal of Honor and the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal. For 2016 he was awarded the Charles Stark Draper Prize .

Fonts

  • Principles of coherent communication, McGraw Hill 1966
  • with Jim Omura: Principles of Digital Communication and Coding, McGraw Hill 1979, Dover 2009
  • CDMA: principles of spread spectrum communication, Addison-Wesley 1995

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Viterbi Error bounds for convolutional codes and an asymptotically optimum decoding algorithm , IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 13, 1967, 260-269