Anthony Ephremides was recently awarded the First ACM SIGMOBILE Award for "Outstanding Contributions to Research on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data and Computing." The award was instituted by the ACM SIGMOBILE, the Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data and Computing, to recognize an individual who has made a significant and lasting contribution to the research on mobile communications and wireless networking. Prof. Ephremides' award was formally announced at the opening session of the 1996 ACM/IEEE Mobicom Conference, held in New York in November, 1996. The announcement was followed by the presentation of the Sigmobile globe.
Anthony Ephremides received his B.S. degree from the National Technical University of Athens (1967), and M.S. (1969) and Ph.D. (1971) degrees from Princeton University, all in Electrical Engineering. He has been at the University of Maryland since 1971, and currently holds a joint appointment as Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department and the Institute of Systems Research (ISR). He is co-founder of the NASA Center for Commercial Development of Space on Hybrid and Satellite Communications Networks established in 1991 at Maryland as an off-shoot of the ISR.
He was a Visiting Professor in 1978 at the National Technical University in Athens, Greece, and in 1979 at the EECS Department of the University of California, Berkeley, and at INRIA, France. During 1985- 1986 he was on leave at MIT and ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. He was the General Chairman of the 1986 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in Athens, Greece. He has also been the Director of the Fairchild Scholars and Doctoral Fellows Program, an academic and research partnership program in Satellite Communications between Fairchild Industries and the University of Maryland. He won the IEEE Donald E. Fink Prize Paper Award (1992). He has been the President of the Information Theory Society of the IEEE (1987), and served on the Board of the IEEE (1989 and 1990).
Dr. Ephremides' interests are in the areas of communication theory, communication systems and networks, queueing systems, signal processing, and satellite communications. His email address is: tony@eng.umd.edu.
Dr. G. David Forney, Jr. was awarded the 23rd annual Marconi International Fellowship for his contributions to the field of data transmission technology. The award was made by the President of India at a formal ceremony in New Delhi on January 20, 1997. Dr. Forney was cited for his "contributions to communications theory and the application of those insights to data transmission products." Regarded as the "Nobel Prize" of communications, the Marconi International Fellowship was established in 1974 on the 100th anniversary of the birth of its namesake, Nobel-Prize-winning wireless pioneer Guglielmo Marconi, by his daughter, Mrs. Gioia Marconi Barga. The award is given annually for distinguished innovation in communications that has a significant impact on humanity. It carries a $100,000 cash award. Recent award winners include: Dr. Gottfried Ungerboeck, 1996; Professor Jacob Ziv, 1995; Dr. Andrew Viterbi, 1990; Dr. Robert W. Lucky, 1987; and Professor Leonard Kleinrock, 1986.
Dr. Forney also recently received the Christopher Columbus Prize in International Communication. The award was made by the mayor of Genoa on October 12, 1996. The honor carries a cash award of 15 million lire.
Dr. Forney, currently Vice President of the Technical Staff of Motorola, Inc. in Mansfield, Mass., is regarded as a founder of the modem industry. In 1970 he invented the first reliable high-speed modem, later adopted as an international standard, out of which all subsequent modem technology has grown. He was Vice President-Research and Development of Codex Corporation at the time of its acquisition by Motorola in 1977.
Dr. Forney graduated {\em summa cum laude} in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1961. He received his Masters and Doctorate degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is currently Bernard M. Gordon Adjunct Professor. He has been awarded the IEEE Edison Medal, the IEEE Information Theory Society Shannon Award, and the Christopher Columbus Prize in International Communication. He has been a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering since 1983.
The IEEE Board of Directors, at its meeting of 11 December 1996, selected Thomas M. Cover as recipient of the 1997 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal. The Hamming Medal is awarded in recognition of exceptional contributions to information sciences and systems and is sponsored by Lucent Technologies. Prof. Cover's award citation reads: "For fundamental contributions to information and communication theory, statistics and pattern recognition." The presentation will take place at the IEEE Honors Ceremony to be held at the Renaissance Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio on Saturday evening, 28 June 1997.
Thomas Cover was born on August 7, 1938, in Pasadena, California. He obtained the Bachelor's degree in Physics from MIT in 1960 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford in 1961 and 1964 respectively.
Dr. Cover became an Assistant Professor at Stanford University in 1964. His initial research interests were in pattern recognition, where he did early work on capacity and generalization in neural nets. He established the factor of two bound for the nearest neighbor rule with Peter Hart. At this time, he also worked on learning with finite memory with one of his first Ph.D. students, Marty Hellman, who later went on to develop public key cryptosystems. In 1972, he introduced the theory of broadcast channels.
Dr. Cover was the Vinton Hayes Research Fellow at Harvard University and Visiting Assistant Professor at MIT in 1971-72. He received a joint appointment at Stanford University as an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Department of Statistics in 1971 and was promoted to Professor in 1972. Cover served as President of the IEEE Information Theory Society (then a Group) in 1972.
Professor Cover's work in information theory includes work on the broadcast channel, the relay channel, and the extension of the Slepian-Wolf theorem to jointly ergodic sources in 1975. Together with S.K. Leung, he found a new rate region for multiple access channels with feedback in 1978, and in joint work with A. El Gamal established an achievable rate region for the multiple descriptions problem.
Prof. Cover has also contributed papers on the relationship of information theory to classical inequalities and large deviation theory, and has contributed to measurement selection and the capacity of the Gaussian channel with feedback, establishing Pinsker and Ebert's result that feedback cannot improve the capacity of a Gaussian channel by more than a factor of two.
He has supervised 35 Ph.D. students, many of whom are teaching at universities in the United States and Europe. Prof. Cover has served as Director of the Information Systems Laboratory at Stanford from 1988 through 1996, and was named to the Kwoh-Ting Li Chair in Engineering in 1994. He currently leads a research group in information theory at Stanford.
Dr. Cover's main contributions in communications have been in multiple user information theory, starting with his initial work on the broadcast channel. His papers on multiple access channel capacity have contributed to the understanding and comparative analysis of the relative merits of code division frequency division, and time division multiple access technology.
He has developed universal investment algorithm counterparts to universal data compression and has served as contract statistician for the California State Lottery from 1986-1994.
Dr. Cover is a fellow of the IEEE, the Institute for Mathematical Statistics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has published 110 papers. He is coauthor, with J. Thomas, of the text, {\em Elements of Information Theory}, and is coeditor of the book, {\em Open Problems in Communication and Computation}. He has received a number of awards including the IEEE Information Theory Best Paper Prize in 1972, the Claude E. Shannon Award in 1990, and the IEEE Neural Nets Council Pioneer Award in 1994. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.