Jacob Ziv (Tiberíades, Israel; 1931-2023) trained as an electrical engineer at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in the 1950s, then went on to complete a PhD in 1962 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (United States). He returned to the Technion in the 1970s, where he was Dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering from 1974 to 1976 and Vice President for Academic Affairs from 1978 to 1982. He subsequently took up the chairmanship of the Israeli Universities Planning and Grants Committee (1985-1991), the interphase between the Government of Israel and the country’s universities.
In his long career he worked in teaching, research and the business world – holding posts at Bell Laboratories Inc. and Melpar Inc. during his years in the United States – and even in the planning of scientific and higher education policy.
He was a member of the Israel National Academy of Sciences and Humanities and served as its president from 1996 until 2005. He was also a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, the U.S. Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He has received the Israel Prize in Exact Sciences (1993) and the Richard W. Hamming Medal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE (1995), along with the Golden Jubilee Award (1998) and Claude E. Shannon Prize (1997) of the IEEE’s Information Theory Society.
Speech
Information and Communication Technologies, 1st edition
“Like all scientists, I am fascinated by electronic gadgets. I’ve just bought a second-generation iPod that is out of this world.” This was one of Jacob Ziv’s first remarks when receiving the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category. The comment is significant, because the man in question is one of the reasons that we can now enjoy this kind of technology. Ziv’s investigative work has had an impact on our lives that is both palpable and universal. It is to him we owe, in partnership with Abraham Lempel, the development of the LZ77 algorithm, a key enabling tool for the creation of file types like mp3 or pdf. “Many systems rely on data compression for more efficient storage,” he explains when asked about the impact of his findings.
Jacob Ziv is at the leading edge of Information Theory. Acknowledging his debt to Claude Shannon and his ground-breaking 1948 opus A Mathematical Theory of Communication‘ he declares himself “fortunate” to form part of a “relatively new branch of science which has laid the foundations for modern communication technologies.”
Ziv is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. But the institution that is his “home from home” is the Israel Institute of Technology, the Technion, where he first trained and to which he returned as a faculty member in 1970 after completing his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Ziv is Emeritus Professor of Electrical Engineering at this important university, located in Haifa, which is a center of excellence in information and communication technologies as well as other disciplines like medicine. His professional career has taken him into teaching, research and the corporate world – at Bell Laboratories and Melpar, during his time in the United States – and he has been called upon as an advisor in science and university policy. His work on Information Theory has also had a bearing on major technological developments.
Ziv’s involvement in university life has extended to occupying the post of Dean in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, the Technion’s largest, from 1974 to 1976 and that of Vice President for Academic Affairs from 1978 to 1982. He later took on the chairmanship of the Universities Planning and Grants Committee (1985 to 1991), the organization acting as interface between the Israeli government and the universities.
Jacob Ziv tends to caution when talking about the future products of his theories. “Predicting the future is always a risky business, though we are certainly seeing data compression concepts being applied in other areas like knowledge theory, or outside the communication arena, in bioengineering.” It remains to be seen whether these ideas, so fruitful in communication systems, will prove equally effective in other terrains.
But the virtues of his LZ77 algorithm would appear to be beyond all doubt. To anyone who ever wondered how a film or a book could “occupy so little space”, this algorithm provides the answer. It works, basically, by identifying the most frequent redundancies in the language. In text, for instance, the algorithm could convert a common three-letter word like “and” into a single unit, thereby saving storage space without any loss of meaningful information.
Curiously for one who has championed a tighter connection between research, including university research, and the business world, Ziv never patented his algorithm – a kind of technological Rosetta stone whose market value would have been near-on incalculable, to judge by its applications. “We didn’t make a cent from it,” he says resignedly, “but we had a lot of fun developing it.” Not for this expert are science and economics two worlds apart. Consider, for instance, his reaction to the Frontiers award. On receiving the news, Jacob Ziv declared himself “deeply honored” by the award. “I am especially delighted that, in the midst of a world economic crisis, the foundation of a financial institution has opted to uphold the importance of the scientific spirit.”
Both Ziv and his algorithm are still going from strength to strength. His compression principle has enabled hugely popular compression standards in the music, film and book industries including mp3 (for sound), jpg (image) or pdf (text). And not only do the data take up less space, they can also be transmitted at greater speeds. Ziv’s ideas in this field have also been instrumental in improving the capacity of hard drives and optimizing Internet retransmission. These applications are joined by other contributions from the more theoretical side of Ziv’s work. Holder of a PhD in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he has authored numerous works on Information Theory addressing aspects of “lossy” compression (when not all the original data can be retrieved). These have proved a major influence in video compression as well as finding applications in DVD and high-definition television technologies.
The taxonomic distinction between basic and applied science loses most of its meaning with people like Ziv
His work is equally inspiring to basic and applied researchers, engineers and information theorists. As well as anticipating the future, it has shaped today’s state-of-the-art technology and may yet open up new opportunities for technological development.
The challenge now is to check how his discoveries fit with recent advances in other technoscientific areas. “There is feedback loop,” says Ziv, “between nanotechnology and the manufacture of smaller and smaller circuits. And we also have a limitless capacity to generate information. So although computer memory capacity is in constant expansion, due partly to nanotechnology and other applications, so too is the speed at which data is being generated. And that’s where the need comes in for more efficient compression”.
