(212) 854-6580 April 22, 1999

rjn2@columbia.edu

James L. Massey, professor emeritus of the Eidgenšssische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in ZŸrich, will receive the $100,000 Marconi International Fellowship, awarded by the Guglielmo Marconi International Fellowship Foundation located at Columbia University, on April 24 in Bologna, Italy.

The occasion marks the 25th anniversary of the Foundation as well as the 125th anniversary of the birth of Marconi, the inventor of wireless communications.

ãGuglielmo Marconiâs vision is being amplified as the second century of wireless begins,ä said Martin Meyerson, chairman of the foundation and president emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania. ãWireless cell phones, modems and networks are just the beginning of an extraordinary untethering of the world that is now taking place.ä

Dr. Massey, whose work in error-correction coding was incorporated into NASAâs deep-space communications systems for its scientific missions to Venus, Jupiter and Saturn, will accept the Marconi Fellowship in an awards ceremony in the Aula Magna at the University of Bologna Saturday at 10 A.M. He is being

recognized ãfor his work on coding and cryptography, which has various practical as well as theoretical applications.ä

At the banquet, Dr. Meyerson will introduce Dr. Massey, who will speak on Marconiâs prescient vision of what could be possible with wireless transmissions as well as the scientific goals he hopes to pursue with the Foundationâs support.

The Marconi Fellowship, considered the premier award in communications science, technology and related endeavors, was established in 1974 by Marconiâs daughter, Gioia Marconi Braga, to mark the centennial of the inventorâs birth. After her death in 1996, she was succeeded as chairman by Dr. Meyerson. The Foundation, which administers the award, was incorporated under New York State law in November 1996. Originally at the Aspen Institute and then at Polytechnic University, it is now located at Columbiaâs Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, which is led by Zvi Galil, dean of engineering and Schapiro Professor at Columbia. The Fellowship, presented annually since 1975, includes $100,000 and a work of sculpture.

Dr. Masseyâs principal innovation in error-correction systems was the discovery of a practical way to decode certain convolutional codes. These are codes in which each information bit affects not only the current encoded block of data, but also additional blocks beyond it. When a block is garbled in transmission, all the blocks in the memory span can be used to reconstruct the information. ãThe ability of the code to combat noise is achieved by making this memory span sufficiently large,ä Dr. Massey said.

He developed his decoding device, called a threshold decoder, in doctoral research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. If one chooses the code carefully, one can get an efficient decoder that operates by computing certain ãindependent checksä on each information bit, then comparing a weighted combination of these checks to a fixed threshold to determine the most likely value of that information bit. ãI think it is fair to say that threshold decoders were the first practical error correcting decoders,ä Dr. Massey said. Codex Corporation was founded in 1962 to exploit the error-correction technology; it is now a division of Motorola. The Communications Satellite Corporation adapted the code for its INTELSAT IV system beginning in 1969. The Soviet Union also adopted threshold decoders to improve the efficiency and reliability of communications in its polar

weather monitoring network.

The promise of the new technology quickly led the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to develop coded systems for their deep-space probes beginning in the late 1960s, and to opt for convolutional codes after the success of the system on the 1969 Pioneer 9 solar orbit space mission. Together with a doctoral student at Notre Dame, Dr. Massey devised a ãquick-look-inä convolutional code that from 1972 onwards became NASAâs standard for deep- space missions, including the Pioneer 10 Jupiter fly-by, the Pioneer 11 Saturn fly-by and the Pioneer 12 Venus orbiter, and was used in the German space agencyâs Helios solar orbiter missions. The European Space Agencyâs Giotto space probe, which examined the core of Halleyâs Comet in 1986, benefited from another of Dr. Masseyâs innovations, a scheme for optimum frame synchronization.

In the field of cryptography, he has designed two ãsecret-keyä ciphers, which allow two parties who share a secret digital key to exchange coded messages over a public network. Such coding systems used to be a prerogative of military and diplomatic officials, but have become vitally important to the Internet, where sensitive or valuable information ÷ such as credit card numbers ÷ is routinely transmitted.

In 1991, together with an ETH doctoral student, he designed the International Data Encryption Algorithm (IDEA), familiar to Internet devotees as a component of the Pretty Good Privacy software package. With two Armenian scientists, G. Khachatrian and M. Kuregian, Dr. Massey more recently designed the cipher SAFER+ for Cylink Corporation as its entry in the U. S. Advanced Encryption Standard competition to replace the venerable U. S. Data Encryption Standard. At Dr. Massey's urging, Cylink has placed SAFER+ entirely in the public domain.

An American by birth and education, Dr. Massey, now 65, is a maxima cum laude graduate of Notre Dame University, with a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Following the international character of the Marconi Foundation, Dr. Massey has conducted research on a global stage. He has held professorial posts at Notre Dame, MIT and the University of California, Los Angeles, and was guest lecturer at the Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby. For 18 years, he was professor for digital systems engineering at ETH ZŸrich, one

of the great centers of technology. Emeritus since 1998, he now holds an adjunct professorial post at the University of Lund in Sweden.

He has been honored across the years for his path-breaking research. He has received honorary degrees from the University of Lund, Sweden and the Institute for Information Transmission Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as honorary professorships from Xidian University, Xiâan, China, and the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. In addition, he has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Engineering, Washington, D.C.; the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences, and the European Academy of Arts and Sciences. He recently received the Forum Engelberg Prize in Switzerland for his technical and entrepreneurial contributions to communications engineering.

Dr. Massey and his wife reside in Copenhagen, Denmark.

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