Dave Forney

George David "Dave" Forney Junior ( born March 6, 1940 in New York City ) is an American information theorist, known in particular for contributions to coding theory.

Life

Forney studied electrical engineering at Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in 1961 and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a master's degree in 1963 and his doctorate in 1965. Afterwards he was with the Codex Corporation in Newton (Massachusetts), in 1970-1975 he Vice President was for research and 1975-1979 for research and development. Codex was in the early 1970s, a pioneer in high-speed digital modems. With the acquisition of Motorola by Codex (1977 ), he was there in 1980 Vice-President ( Technical Staff ) and 1982-1986 Vice President and Director of Technology and Planning.

1971/72 and 1990 he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University and in the 1990s a visiting professor at MIT.

He led in the 1960s in his dissertation Concatenated codes, error- correcting codes of an inner and an outer code, the decoding complexity is polynomial with the block length increases with exponentially decreasing error probability. They were used from the 1970s onwards in space missions. Forney recognized early the importance of the Viterbi algorithm.

In 1995 he received the Claude E. Shannon Award, the 1997 Marconi Prize, 1992, the IEEE Edison Medal, 1984, the Centennial Medal of the IEEE in 1998 and the Golden Jubilee Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2003), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998), the National Academy of Engineering ( 1983), the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the IEEE (1973). In 2007 he became an honorary doctorate from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne ( EPFL).

Writings

• Concatenated codes, MIT Press 1967
• Generalized Minimum Distance Decoding, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Volume 12, 1966, pp. 125-131.
• The Viterbi Algorithm, Proceedings of the IEEE, Volume 61, 1973, p 268-278
• On Decoding BCH codes, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Volume 11, 1965, pp. 549-557 ( Forney algorithm)
• With DJ Costello Jr.Channel coding: The road to channel capacity, Proc. IEEE, Vol 95, 2007, pp. 1150-1177 ( 2009 received the Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award).
• M. Grassl, S. Guha, Convolutional and tail -biting quantum error -correcting codes, IEEE Trans Inform Theory, Volume 53, 2007, pp. 865-880
• With MD Trott, The dynamics of group codes: Dual abelian group codes and systems, IEEE Trans Inform Theory, Volume 50, 2004, pp. 2935-2965