// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Bede Liu, a digital signal processing pioneer, has died
The IEEE Life Fellow is remembered as a founder of the field
The Liu family includes Bede Liu’s wife, Maria; his daughter, Beatrice; his sister, Jane Jernow; his brother, Hal Liu; and grandchildren Charles and Emily Lovett.
IEEE Life Fellow Bede Liu, a digital signal processing pioneer, died on 7 May. He was 91.
Bede Liu, a digital signal processing pioneer, died on 7 May. He was 91.
Liu was widely regarded as one of the founders of modern digital signal processing, a field that applies mathematical algorithms to analyze, modify, and transmit signals including sound, images, and video.
The IEEE Life Fellow taught electrical engineering at Princeton for more than 50 years. From 1994 to 1997, he chaired the university’s electrical and computer engineering department.
Liu’s research aided the transition from analog to digital processing of sound, images, and video. His work helped establish many of the mathematical and engineering techniques that underpin modern communications, multimedia systems, and consumer electronics.
Although little known outside engineering circles, his work is embedded in technologies used by billions of people. The low-power digital signal processors that make cellphone calls, streaming video, and Internet communications possible can be traced to research he conducted in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Liu received the 2018 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal for “sustained contributions to the analysis and the development of low-complexity realizations of digital signal processing algorithms.”
“We stream music and video. We take photos with our phones, and we send them around. We don’t even think about it,” IEEE Life Fellow H. Vincent Poor said in an obituary for Liu. “But it’s all because of the signal processing, image processing, and video processing that’s been developed over the years, as well as other technologies that have grown up beside it and enabled it, like semiconductors. The development of these processing advances was exactly what Bede was a major part of.” Poor is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton.