Biography of Jacob Ziv
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Jacob Ziv was educated at the Technion and MIT (Sc.D. 1962). Before
coming to MIT in 1959, he had been a Senior Research Engineer at the
Scientific Department, Israel Ministry of Defense, to which he returned
in 1962 as Head of the Communications Division; he also served as an
Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Technion. From 1968
to 1970 he worked at Bell Laboratories. He joined the Technion full
time in 1970, where he is now the Herman Gross Professor of Electrical
Engineering and a Technion Distinguished Professor. He was Dean of the
Faculty of Electrical Engineering from 1974 to 1976, and Vice President
for Academic Affairs of the Technion from 1978 to 1982.
Prof. Ziv served as Chairman of the Israeli Universities Planning and Grants Committee from 1985 to 1991. He is a member of the Israel National Academy of Sciences and Humanities and served as its President from 1996 through 2005. His many other honors and awards include membership in the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and election as a Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Science and the American Philosophical Society. He has been awarded the Israel Prize in Exact Sciences (Engineering and Technology), the Eduard Rhein Prize for Basic Research, the Rothschild Prize for Technological Sciences, the Marconi International Award, the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, and the Shannon Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society.
His major research contributions have been in the area of Information
and Communication Theory. He is particularly known for his work in data
compression, especially his co-development with Abraham Lempel of a
universal lossless source-coding technique, known today as the LZ
algorithm. Besides being theoretically optimal, it performs superbly in
practice; virtually every modern computer or workstation runs one or,
more likely, several implementations of the LZ algorithm in hardware,
software, or both. In 2004, the Lempel-Ziv
data-compression algorithm was declared an IEEE Milestone in Electrical
Engineering and Computing "for enabling data transmission via the
Internet in an effective way, a significant contribution toward making the
Internet a global communications medium."
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