HP Fellow
IEEE Fellow
Mobile and Media Systems Lab
Ronald Schafer, one of the world's leading authorities on
digital signal processing, is an HP Fellow at HP Labs, where
he is focusing on problems of acoustic signal processing
for audio communication and entertainment.
Schafer began his career at Bell Laboratories, where he
contributed to some of the earliest research on digital signal
processing. Digital Signal Processing (DSP) is the technology
of representing signals such as speech, audio and video in
digital form and the modification, transmission and storage
of such signals using digital computation and communication.
As such, DSP is the enabling technology for a wide range
of modern electronic systems, from mobile phones to modems
to digital cameras and multimedia PCs.
In 1974, he joined the Georgia Institute of Technology as the John and
Marilu McCarty Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. At Georgia
Tech, he and his colleagues built the world's most prestigious signal
processing laboratory in academia, the Center for Signal and Image Processing
(CSIP). Under his leadership and direction, this center grew from two
professors to more than a dozen of the world's leading faculty in DSP.
In 1981 he co-founded Atlanta Signal Processors Inc. (ASPI) to create
design tools and hardware boards for DSP system design. The company created
the first PC-plug-in board for Texas Instruments' first programmable digital
signal processor and the first commercial digital filter design software
for support of DSP chips. ASPI developed and marketed a variety of real-time
algorithms, including the MELP speech coder, which became the U.S. Department
of Defense standard for low bit-rate secure voice communication. Later,
ASPI became a leading producer of DSP-based audio conferencing products.
The company was sold to the Polycom Corporation in 2001.
The research Schafer, his students and colleagues conducted underlies
a wide field of consumer technologies as well as technologies for medicine
and national defense. His early research achievements include contributions
to cepstrum analysis and homomorphic filtering, digital interpolation,
time-frequency analysis/synthesis, ADPCM speech coding (a method of method
of encoding sound data files takes up less storage space than the regular
Pulse Code Modulation format) and concatenated speech synthesis.
More recent research yielded important contributions in the areas of iterative
image deblurring; mathematical morphology; 3D image reconstruction; imaging
and statistical modeling in neurobiology; medical imaging; MIMO (Multiple
Input, Multiple Output) communication systems; and demosaicing for digital
cameras.
Schafer was a close collaborator with Hewlett-Packard Laboratories during
his tenure as professor at Georgia Tech. He was co-inventor of one patent
and co-author of numerous research papers with HP Labs researchers, and
he was instrumental in initiating many other research collaborations between
Georgia Tech faculty and HP Labs researchers.
He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Acoustical Society of America, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He has co-authored six widely used textbooks in the DSP field, and has received numerous awards for teaching and research including the 1985 Distinguished Professor Award at Georgia Tech, the 1980 Emanuel R. Piori Award and the 1992 James H. Mulligan Jr. Education Medal from IEEE.
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