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Rothschild Prize
Abraham Lempel
Computer Sciences | 2010
Rothschild Prize in Engineering
Professor Lempel received his doctorate in Electrical Engineering from the Technion in 1967. He became a Full Professor in 1977 and transferred to the Computer Sciences Department a year later. In 1993 he was able to convince Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in California to open a sister laboratory in Israel. The following year the Israeli branch of the labs was established at the Technion, and Professor Lempel acted as its Director until late 2007. The laboratory’s primary work involved print technologies and image processing. Eight US patents have been registered under Professor Lempel’s name.
Professor Lempel carried out pioneering work on data compression and in 1977 published with Ziv the Lempel-Ziv algorithm that became a critical enabling technology in a number of computer and Internet applications and in efficient digital communications.
‘Everything began without any connection to compression. During the 1970s we were attempting to investigate the complexity of a given string of letters from a finite alphabet. We were looking for a way to define the degree of complexity which is dependent only on the structure of the string. The result we arrived at determined the complexity of a string as the maximum number of differing sub-strings into which the string can be parsed. When we discovered this, we immediately understood that it could be used as a basis for a fast and efficient system of compression.’
In recognition of his work, Professor Lempel has been the recipient of many prestigious awards, including The IEEE Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation; the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, 1998; IEEE Milestone in Electrical Engineering and Computing, 2004 and the IEEE Richard Hamming Medal, 2007.