Andrew Viterbi

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Andrew J. Viterbi
PhD
)
OccupationEngineer
Spouse
Erna Finci
(m. 1958; died 2015)
Children3
Engineering career
Discipline
Sanford Burnham Medical Research Institute
Employer(s)Professor:
UC Los Angeles
UC San Diego
Founder/Co-founder:
Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) standard for cell phone networks
AwardsIEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal (1984)
Marconi Prize (1990)
Claude E. Shannon Award (1991)
National Medal of Science (2007)
IEEE/RSE James Clerk Maxwell Medal (2007)
Millennium Technology Prize (2008)
IEEE Medal of Honor (2010)
John Fritz Medal (2011)

Andrew James Viterbi (born Andrea Giacomo Viterbi, March 9, 1935) is an

Viterbi School of Engineering
, which was named in his honor in 2004 in recognition of his $52 million gift.

Early life

Viterbi was born to an

Italian Jewish family[2] in Bergamo, Italy and emigrated with them to the United States two years before World War II. His original name was Andrea, but when he was naturalized in the US, his parents anglicized it to Andrew.[citation needed
]

Education

Viterbi attended the Boston Latin School, and then entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1952, studying electrical engineering. He received both BS and MS in electrical engineering in 1957 from MIT. He was elected to membership in the honor society Eta Kappa Nu in 1956 through the MIT chapter.

He worked at

digital communications.[3]

Career

After receiving his PhD, he applied successfully for an academic position at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Viterbi was later a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA and

DNA analysis, and many other applications of Hidden Markov models. On advice of a lawyer, Viterbi did not patent the algorithm.[4]
Viterbi also helped to develop the
cell phone networks
.

Viterbi was the cofounder of

wireless communications technology companies as a strategic advisor to Ingenu's board of directors.[5]

Virterbi was elected a member of the

Viterbi School of Engineering in his honor, following his $52 million donation to the school.[8] He is a member of the USC board of trustees.[9]

He is also on the Board of Trustees at

The Scripps Research Institute
.

He is also founding member of ISSNAF (The Italian Scientists and Scholars in North America Foundation).

In 2005, he was awarded the

Benjamin Franklin Medal
in Electrical Engineering.

In 2006, he was made an Eminent Member of Eta Kappa Nu.

Viterbi and

IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award, for "fundamental contributions, innovation, and leadership that enabled the growth of wireless telecommunications".[10]

In 2008, he was named a Millennium Technology Prize finalist for the invention of the Viterbi algorithm. At the award ceremony in Finland on June 11, 2008, he was awarded a prize of EUR 115,000 and the prize trophy "Peak" as a 2008 Millennium Technology Laureate.[11][12]

In September 2008, he was awarded the

Code Division Multiple Access
(CDMA) wireless technology that transformed the theory and practice of digital communications".

In 2010, he received the IEEE Medal of Honor and in the same year he also received the IIC Lifetime Achievement Award by the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles. In 2011, he received the John Fritz Medal from the American Association of Engineering Societies.[13]

In 2013, Viterbi was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

In 2017, Viterbi, along with Irwin Jacobs, received the IEEE Milestone Award for their CDMA and spread spectrum development that drives the mobile industry.[14]

Viterbi's problem on the coincidence of PLL ranges

A. Viterbi analytically showed that for the first-order PLL model (filterless model) the three main ranges (hold-in, pull-in, lock-in ranges) coincide.[15]: 4–5 [16] Various conjectures (e.g., Egan's conjecture on the pull-in range of type II APLL) and estimates of the ranges of higher-order PLL models appeared based on this result, which led to the problem of determining the regions of the physical parameters of the PLL (parameters of the phase detector, filter, and voltage-controlled oscillator) where the ranges coincide. In the framework of mathematical control theory, this result is a development of the ideas of the possibility of determining the global behavior of a nonlinear system via linear analysis and various well-known conjectures on global stability (Kalman's conjecture and others) for a cylindrical phase space.

Personal life

Viterbi was married to Erna Finci (1934–2015),[17] who was a Jewish refugee from Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia.[18] Erna was a Shoah survivor. In 1941, during World War II, the Finci family fled German-occupied Yugoslavia for the Italian-occupied zone from which they were deported and interned in the Parma region of Italy. In 1943, when the Nazis occupied Italy, the family was saved from deportation to extermination camps by the people of Gramignazzo di Sissa, the village where they had been interned; they were cared for by the local Ponghellini family, who hid them in their vineyard when German forces advanced into Italy. Other Italians helped them escape to Switzerland, walking across the Alps, where they waited out the war.

They had three children, Alan Viterbi, Audrey Viterbi,[18] and Alexander Viterbi (who died in 2011 at age 40).[19]

See also

  • List of International Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering
  • Viterbi Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research

References

  1. ^ Dr. Andrew J. Viterbi Andrew Viterbi was elected in 1978 as a member of National Academy of Engineering in Electronics, Communication & Information Systems Engineering and Computer Science & Engineering
  2. ^ Marziali, Carl (February 1, 2009). "Andrew Viterbi: He's got algorithm". University of Southern California News.
  3. IEEE
    .
  4. IEEE Global History Network
    . Retrieved 2009-11-10.
  5. ^ "Ingenu Launches the US's Newest IoT Network". Light Reading.
  6. IEEE Information Theory Society. Archived
    from the original on 21 July 2011. Retrieved 2011-07-14.
  7. ^ Wireless History Foundation (2010). "Andrew Viterbi". WHF Hall of Fame. Retrieved March 19, 2024.
  8. ^ "Engineer/Entrepreneur and wife make $52 million naming gift to USC" (Press release). University of Southern California (USC). Archived from the original on 3 May 2007. Retrieved 2007-06-05.
  9. ^ Board of Trustees Archived 2011-07-26 at the Wayback Machine, University of Southern California, Retrieveded 2008-04-13.
  10. ^ "IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award Recipients" (PDF). IEEE. Retrieved 2011-10-04.
  11. ^ Doug Lung (11 April 2008). "Andrew Viterbi Named Finalist for 2008 Millennium Technology Prize". tvtechnology.com.
  12. Viterbi School of Engineering
    . 12 June 2008.
  13. ^ "Award Guide and Past Recipients". American Association of Engineering Societies (AAES). Archived from the original on 2013-05-11. Retrieved 2013-04-01.
  14. Times of San Diego
    . 8 November 2017. Retrieved 2017-11-09.
  15. Viterbi, Andrew J.
    (1959). Acquisition and tracking behavior of phase-locked loops (Report). Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.
  16. ^ Viterbi, Andrew J. (1966). Principles of Coherent Communications. New York: McGraw-Hill.
  17. ^ Vered Weiss, "Wife Of Qualcomm Founder, Philanthropist Erna Viterbi Dies At 81", jewishbusinessnews.com, 2015-02-19. Retrieved 2017-01-18.
  18. ^ a b Marziali, Carl (Spring 2015). "In Memoriam: Philanthropist Erna Viterbi Dies at 81". University of Southern California News.
  19. ^ Kessler, Benett (November 10, 2011). "Mammoth man died from heart attack". Sierra Wave: Eastern Sierra News. Retrieved October 11, 2018.

Further reading

  • Brodsky, Ira. "The History of Wireless: How Creative Minds Produced Technology for the Masses" (Telescope Books, 2008)

External links

Awards and achievements
Preceded by John Fritz Medal
2011
Succeeded by
Preceded by IEEE Medal of Honor
2010
Succeeded by
Preceded by National Medal of Science
2007
Succeeded by
Preceded by
(First)
IEEE/RSE James Clerk Maxwell Medal
2007
Succeeded by
Preceded by Claude E. Shannon Award
1991
Succeeded by
Preceded by Marconi Prize
1990
Succeeded by
Preceded by IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal
1984
Succeeded by