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Andrew Viterbi
Summary
Andrew James Viterbi (born Andrea Giacomo Viterbi, March 9, 1935) is an Italian Jewish–American electrical engineer and businessman who co-founded Qualcomm Inc. and invented the Viterbi algorithm. He is the Presidential Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering, which was named in his honor in 2004 in recognition of his $52 million gift.
Viterbi was born to an Italian Jewish family in Bergamo, Italy and emigrated with them to the United States two years before World War II. His original name was Andrea, but when he was naturalized in the US, his parents anglicized it to Andrew.
Viterbi attended the Boston Latin School, and then entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1952, studying electrical engineering. He received both BS and MS in electrical engineering in 1957 from MIT. He was elected to membership in the honor society Eta Kappa Nu in 1956 through the MIT chapter.
He worked at Raytheon and later at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, where he started working on telemetry for uncrewed space missions, also helping to develop the phase-locked loop. Simultaneously, he was carrying out PhD studies at the University of Southern California, where he graduated in 1963 in digital communications.
After receiving his PhD, he applied successfully for an academic position at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Viterbi was later a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA and University of California, San Diego (UCSD). In 1967 he proposed the Viterbi algorithm to decode convolutionally encoded data. It is still used widely in cellular phones for error correcting codes, as well as for speech recognition, DNA analysis, and many other applications of Hidden Markov models. On advice of a lawyer, Viterbi did not patent the algorithm.
Viterbi also helped to develop the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) standard for cell phone networks.
Viterbi was the cofounder of Linkabit Corporation, with Irwin M.
Official source
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