Monday, May 08, 2006

Dr. Andrew Viterbi...............

This guy was one of the two genius's who started Qualcomm in San Diego. He and Mr. Jacobs hit it big with Link-a-Bit, then sold out to M/A Comm and after having enough of that, went out to make the big bucks with their new technology. Smart guys.

The Viterbi algorithm was conceived by Andrew Viterbi as an error-correction scheme for noisy digital communication links, finding universal application in decoding the convolutional codes used in both CDMA and GSM digital cellular, dial-up modems, satellite, deep-space communications, and 802.11 wireless LANs. It is now also commonly used in speech recognition, keyword spotting, computational linguistics, and bioinformatics. For example, in speech-to-text (speech recognition), the acoustic signal is treated as the observed sequence of events, and a string of text is considered to be the "hidden cause" of the acoustic signal. The Viterbi algorithm finds the most likely string of text given the acoustic signal.

Dr. Viterbi chewed me out royally one day in the offices of Drexel Burnham Lambert when I asked him about one of his competitors. Can't blame him, the company was a fierce competitor for years. Viterbi won. Big.

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