Texas Instruments' New Master of R&D

6 min read

On 19 January, Texas Instruments Inc., in Dallas, named Johannes ”Hans” Stork as its new chief technology officer. Born in the Netherlands and educated at Delft University of Technology and then at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., Stork was made a Fellow of the IEEE in 1994 for his work on silicon germanium heterojunction bipolar technology. Before Texas Instruments tapped him, he managed areas of research at IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, Calif. Stork told IEEE Spectrum senior technical editor Linda Geppert his plans for the company in a 23 January interview.

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From WinZips to Cat GIFs, Jacob Ziv’s Algorithms Have Powered Decades of Compression

The lossless-compression pioneer received the 2021 IEEE Medal of Honor

11 min read
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Photo of Jacob Ziv
Photo: Rami Shlush
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Lossless data compression seems a bit like a magic trick. Its cousin, lossy compression, is easier to comprehend. Lossy algorithms are used to get music into the popular MP3 format and turn a digital image into a standard JPEG file. They do this by selectively removing bits, taking what scientists know about the way we see and hear to determine which bits we'd least miss. But no one can make the case that the resulting file is a perfect replica of the original.

Not so with lossless data compression. Bits do disappear, making the data file dramatically smaller and thus easier to store and transmit. The important difference is that the bits reappear on command. It's as if the bits are rabbits in a magician's act, disappearing and then reappearing from inside a hat at the wave of a wand.

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