Eric Mankin
February 27, 2009 —
Former rock guitarist, motorcyclist, Venice Beach resident and USC engineering grad student returned to old haunts February 26 as a distinguished senior scientist, re-connecting with old classmates, colleagues, friends — and delivering the seventh Andrew Viterbi Distinguished Lecture in Communication.
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Gray and former M.I.T. classmate Lloyd Armstrong Jr., now USC provost emeritus
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Gray lecture
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The USC ties of Robert M. Gray, now Alcatel-Lucent Technologies Professor of Communications and Networking in the Stanford University Department of Electrical Engineering, run extremely deep, and Gray devoted at least a third of his time exploring them, along with a discussion of "Codes and Coin Flips: Compression and Modeling," the formal title of his talk.
Gray came to USC as a grad student from M.I.T., where one of his oldest student friendships was with USC provost-emeritus Lloyd Armstrong Jr., present in the audience. He was personally recruited by USC engineering legend Zohrab Kaprielian, who had hired a group of star faculty in the field of communications, and was looking for the best graduate students for them.
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Andrew Viterbi, Solomon Golomb, and Yannis C. Yortsos await the Viterbi Keynote Address
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His faculty and thesis advisor at USC was Robert Scholtz, also present in the audience, just a day after a USC reception honoring his election to the National Academy of Engineering. His presentation included photographs of Scholtz, Sol Golomb (in a pentamino portrait), Lloyd Welch (who had offered help at a crucial point in his thesis writing) and a very young Andrew Viterbi, whose algorithm surfaces in a novel application in the technical work presented.
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Ming Hsieh Department co-chair Sandy Sawchuk introduced Gray. (click on photo to hear his introduction)
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All of these, along with spouses, including Gray's Viterbi lecture predecessor Jack K. Wolf, were in the audience. So were a number of former graduate students, many of them now professors, a surprising number of these female. Gray said, both proudly and sadly, that his former grad students amount to 4 percent of all female professors of electrical engineering in the U.S.
Gray's smile broadened as he described his delight in his life in Southern California as a transplanted easterner, living at Venice Beach, forming his own rock band, MCF ( initials for what his Wikipedia entry calls an "unprintable" name) with Reed-Solomon code namesake Gus Solomon as voice coach; his attendance at concerts by Big Brother (where he met his wife), Creedence and other great late 60s bands, and a heady intellectual atmosphere of ideas not just thought but lived.
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Professor Robert Scholtz bestows a doctoral hood on his former student, 40 years after the Ph.D.
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And he also spoke enthusiastically about a new paradigm for compression of images and other information for communication: "if you can simulate something, you can compress it."
At the end of the speech, Scholtz presented him with a very non-digital memorial, his doctor's hood to go with his USC Ph.D. which he had never received after missing commencement ceremonies in 1969.
