L-R: USC President Steven Sample, Erna and Andrew Viterbi, holding a bouquet of flowers, and USC Provost and former Viterbi School Dean C. L. Max Nikias.

Andrew J. Viterbi, who holds the USC Presidential Chair of Engineering, has been named an Eminent Member of Eta Kappa Nu (HKN), the national honor society for electrical and computer engineering.

 

HKN awards the Eminent Member status as its highest membership classification, and requires “attainments and contributions to society through leadership in engineering that have resulted in significant benefits to humankind” for the distinction.

 

Viterbi’s principal original research contribution, the Viterbi Algorithm, has changed the world. The algorithm is used in most digital cellular phones and digital satellite receivers, as well as in such diverse fields as magnetic recording, voice recognition, and DNA sequence analysis. More recently, he has concentrated his efforts on establishing CDMA as the multiple access technology of choice for cellular telephony and wireless data communication.

 

Viterbi is also a noted humanitarian and philanthropist. A record-setting $52 million gift from him and his wife, Erna, named the USC Viterbi School of Engineering in 2004.

 

In accepting the award, conferred at the 2006 IEEE Radio and Wireless Symposium in San Diego, California, Viterbi said, "I am honored to be selected for inclusion among such a distinguished group of my professional peers. Interestingly, this is the fiftieth anniversary of my election to Eta Kappa Nu as a student at MIT and the three hundredth birthday of the eminent "founder" of our discipline, Benjamin Franklin."

 

Viterbi is a co-founder and retired vice chairman and chief technical officer of QUALCOMM Incorporated. He spent equal portions of his career in industry, having previously co-founded Linkabit Corporation, and in academia, as a professor in the Schools of Engineering and Applied Science, first at UCLA and then at UCSD, where he is now professor emeritus. He is currently president of the Viterbi Group, a technical advisory and investment company.

 

Viterbi has received numerous honors both in the United States and internationally. Among these are six honorary doctorates from universities in Canada, Israel, Italy, and the United States.  He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received the Marconi International Fellowship Award, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell and Claude Shannon Awards, the NEC C&C Award, the Eduard Rhein Foundation Award, the Christopher Columbus Medal, and the Franklin Medal.

 

He has also received an honorary title from the President of Italy, and he has served on the U.S. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. Viterbi serves on boards of numerous non-profit institutions, including the University of Southern California. He also serves on the California Council on Science and Technology, the MIT Visiting Committee for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, the Burnham Institute, and the Scripps Research Institute.

 

Viterbi joins USC President Steven B. Sample, who is also a member of the Viterbi School’s Electrical Engineering faculty, as an Eminent Member of Eta Kappa Nu.

 

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