“In order to run a computer program at the time, you had to use punch cards," he recalls. Melpar, where he worked on error-correcting software. While at MIT, Ziv held a part-time job at U.S. It may be clear that the algorithm is working, but nobody really knows whether it is the best result possible. Ziv contrasts that certainty with the uncertainty of a deep-learning algorithm. So if you invest the computational effort, you can know you are approaching the best outcome possible." “It tells you what is the best that you can ever achieve, and tells you how to approximate the outcome. “Information theory is beautiful," he says. research involved a method of determining how to encode and decode messages sent through a noisy channel, minimizing the probability and error while at the same time keeping the decoding simple. Ziv arrived in Cambridge, Mass., in 1960. And where else would one study information theory but MIT, where Claude Shannon, the field's pioneer, had started out? Information Theory (Prentice-Hall, 1953), one of the earliest books on the subject, by Stanford Goldman, and he decided to make information theory his focus. Ziv planned to continue working in communications, but he was no longer interested in just the hardware. That is why I didn't go into real computer science." “In order to run a computer program at the time, you had to use punch cards and I hated them. Their electrical engineering education had focused more on power systems. The trouble was, Ziv recalls, that none of the engineers in the group, including himself, had more than a basic understanding of electronics. Rafael Advanced Defense Systems) to develop electronic components for use in missiles and other military systems. When the war ended, he entered Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to study electrical engineering.Īfter completing his master's degree in 1955, Ziv returned to the defense world, this time joining Israel's National Defense Research Laboratory (now ![]() Ziv's reassignment took him to the Israeli Air Force, where he trained as a radar technician. Drafted into the Israel Defense Forces, he served briefly on the front lines until a group of mothers held organized protests, demanding that the youngest soldiers be sent elsewhere. When the Arab-Israeli War began in 1948, Ziv was in high school. He never did get that transmitter to work. When he plugged the contraption in, the entire house went dark. He also tried to build a Marconi transmitter from metal player-piano parts. While practicing violin, for example, he came up with a scheme to turn his music stand into a lamp. Electricity and gadgets-and little else-fascinated him as a child. Ziv was born in 1931 to Russian immigrants in Tiberias, a city then in British-ruled Palestine and now part of Israel. It is his full body of work, spanning more than half a century, that earned him theĢ021 IEEE Medal of Honor “for fundamental contributions to information theory and data compression technology, and for distinguished research leadership." Ziv went on to partner with other researchers on other innovations in compression. Without these algorithms, we'd likely be mailing large data files on discs instead of sending them across the Internet with a click, buying our music on CDs instead of streaming it, and looking at Facebook feeds that don't have bouncing animated images. That algorithm became the basis for the Unix compress program used in the early '80s WinZip and Gzip, born in the early '90s and the GIF and TIFF image formats. The following year, the two researchers issued a refinement, LZ78. Shannon Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society Major awards: IEEE Medal of Honor “for fundamental contributions to information theory and data compression technology, and for distinguished research leadership" BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award Claude E. National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, IEEE Fellow Organizational memberships: Israel Academy of Science and Humanities, U.S. How he starts the day: A cup of espresso and a piece of dark chocolate ![]() Birthplace: Tiberias, British-ruled Palestine (now Israel)įamily: Married to Shoshana, four children, nine grandchildrenĮducation: BSc, Dip-Eng, MSc, all in electrical engineering from Technion, in 1954, 1955, 1957 Sc.D, MIT, 1962įavorite books: Detective stories, particularly those featuring Perry Masonįavorite kind of music: classical, particularly Bach jazz
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