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Have you used a cell phone today to
place or to receive a call? If so, you’re a beneficiary of one the many
contributions to communications technology made by Dr. Andrew J. Viterbi,
this year’s recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical
Engineering, one of the Franklin Institute Awards. Bestowed annually since 1824 by the Franklin Institute in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, these honors are among the longest-standing
and most prestigious prizes in the world. Called “America’s Nobels,”
Franklin Institute awards have be milestones in the careers of over 100
scientists who later received the scientific world’s highest honor, the
Nobel Prize, as well as many names that are synonymous with the
development of science and technology in 19th, 20th
and now 21st century.
Throughout his long and impressive
career, Dr. Viterbi has been a pioneer in communications and information
technology. Following his BS and MS degrees from MIT in 1957, Dr.
Viterbi worked at California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, participating in the communications technology for the first
US-launched satellite, Explorer I. His work on “spread spectrum”
systems for this project led to his PhD research on error correcting
codes at University of Southern California. After completing his degree
in 1962, he joined the UCLA faculty, teaching courses in digital
communications and information theory. While teaching at UCLA, Dr.
Viterbi developed and published the Viterbi algorithm. The paper
"Error bounds for convolutional codes and an asymptotically optimum
decoding algorithm" was published in IEEE Transactions on Information
Theory in 1967. This was to prove one his most important
contributions, but the accumulation of citations to this work shows an
unusual delay, with few acknowledgements in the journal literature of a
report that would eventually transform how we communicate both voice and
image data (see figure 1).
Whereas most articles of such
importance receive early attention and are rapidly acknowledged in
contemporary works, the Viterbi paper showed little citation activity in
the first 15 years after its publication. The computers of that era
were simply not advanced enough to apply the Viterbi method even to
shallow decoding problems. As processor efficiency increased rapidly in
the 1980’s, the algorithm could be applied more readily, and began to
appear in the references of articles in electrical and electronic
engineering and the new field of computer sciences. The greatest
increase in applications had to wait another 10 or 15 years for the
still burgeoning field of digital and wireless communications to
develop. Viterbi’s work was so valuable and so visionary that nearly
three decades have passed, and scientists in many fields are still
finding ways to employ this powerful decoding method, with his earliest
paper receiving more citations in 2004 alone than in the first 13 years
of its existence.
Citations are an acknowledgement by
one’s peers and colleagues of the importance of a published work. The
accumulation of large numbers of such references mark a work that has
influenced the published literature of a subject, often in direct
proportion to the intellectual influence exerted by the innovation
reported. Viterbi’s two earliest books on communications and
information theory – his 1966 Principles of Coherent Communication,
and his 1973 Principles of Digital Communication – are themselves
referenced extensively, with over 600 citations to each of these works.
In total, his many articles, books, technical reports and proceedings
reports, form a significant part of the current literature in
communications with a total of nearly 5300 citations from journals
indexed in the Thomson ISI citation database, Web of Science™.
These citations resulted in Dr. Viterbi being identified by
ISIHighlyCited.com as one of the top 250 most cited scientist for his
publications in computer sciences. Andrew Viterbi’s other honors
include membership in the National Academy of Engineering, National
Academy of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He
has received the Marconi Fellowship Award, the IEEE Alexander Graham
Bell, and Claude Shannon Awards, as well as the NEC C&C Award the Eduard
Rhein Award and the prestigious Christopher Columbus Medal.
One mark of a technology that
transforms society is that it rapidly becomes ubiquitous, and even
assumed as part of normal life. In essence, it disappears by virtue of
its very usefulness. In contrast, one mark of a researcher that
transforms a subject is that his contributions do not vanish, but rather
ramify, in citations, to the next generation of researcher. Although his
role in the development of communications technology demonstrates both
these signs of influence, perhaps Andrew Viterbi’s more important and
lasting contributions will result from his efforts towards the
development of new researchers and entrepreneurs in science and
technology. He has turned the commercial success of his own discoveries
toward the fostering of emerging companies, technologies and students.
He has served on the United State’s President’s Information Technology
Advisory Committee, Recently, he and his wife, Erna, gifted $52 million
dollars to the Engineering school at his alma mater, University of
Southern California, endowing the Andrew and Erna Viterbi School of
Engineering. He currently serves as president of the Viterbi Group, a
consulting and investment company that helps develop startup companies
in communication, network, and imaging technologies. He has also
recently been named a Trustee of the Scripps Research Institute, and of
the Mathematical Science Research Institute. These are only the most
recent of Viterbi’s leadership roles, just as the Franklin Medal is only
the most recent of his many awards.
Dr. Viterbi’s record in
ISIHighlyCited.com is available here: 
For more information:
about the Franklin Institute Awards
http://www.fi.edu/tfi/exhibits/bower/index.html
about the 2005 Benjamin Franklin
Medal in Electrical Engineering:
http://www.fi.edu/tfi/exhibits/bower/05/elec_engineer.html
about The Viterbi School of
Engineering at USC:
http://viterbi.usc.edu/about/
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