Memorial Tributes Volume 20 (2016) / Chapter Skim
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ROBERT PRICE
ROBERT PRICE
Pages 228-237
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From page 229... ...
Washington, north of Philadelphia, and studied at the William Penn charter school, one of the oldest private schools in Philadelphia. Following his AB degree in physics in 1950 from Princeton, and a short stint at Philco Labs in Philadelphia, he joined the MIT Lincoln Laboratory and simultaneously enrolled at MIT, where Robert Fano suggested the topic that would lead to his ScD dissertation, "Statistical Theory Applied to Communication Through Multipath Disturbances" (MIT RLE Technical Report 266, September 1953)
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From page 230... ...
This would not work when the signal is random, but studying his formulas, Bob noticed that the computation could be regarded as a cross correlation between the received waveform and a least mean squares estimate of the random Gaussian signal. In actual applications even such an estimate would be difficult to compute, but he pointed out that it would be possible to use intelligent approximations to obtain a useful estimate.
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From page 231... ...
Most significantly, the success of modern mobile phones relies heavily on the rake concept, with almost every cell phone implementing a Rake receiver. As the rake paper by Price and Green (1958)
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From page 232... ...
Markey and composer George Antheil for a secrecy system employing frequency hopping. Of Hedy, Bob wrote, "growing up in Austria, the only child of a prominent Vienna banker had shown, at age 16, a flair for innovation by letting herself be filmed in total nudity when starting in the Czech-produced classic, ‘Ecstasy' (the 5th of her many motion pictures)
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From page 233... ...
A powerful radar had recently been built by Lincoln Laboratory at the MIT Haystack Observatory atop Millstone Hill in nearby Westford, and Price and Green wondered if it could be used to bounce signals off the planet Venus! Rough "paper napkin" calculations cast doubt on these hopes, but it was allayed when Robert Kingston joined the discussions.
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From page 234... ...
Price then closeted himself for several months in a basement office, in effect doing pioneering work in what later came to be called digital signal processing. (I remember Price excitedly communicating that in the digital domain he could easily get excellent approximations to the physically unrealizable "boxcar" analog filter.)
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From page 235... ...
He left Lincoln Laboratory in 1965 to become a research scientist and manager at the newly established Sperry Research Center in Sudbury, MA, from 1965 to 1983. He applied modern communications methods to digital recording, inventing digital equalization filtering techniques, which led to the quadrupling of data storage density (Price et al.
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From page 236... ...
He received the Edwin Howard Armstrong Achievement Award of the IEEE Communications Society in 1981, and was elected to the NAE in 1985. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma XI; a Fulbright Fellow, CSIRO Radio Physics Division (1953–1954)
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From page 237... ...
1956. Optimum detection of random signals in noise, with applications to scatter multipath communication, I
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