ZIV, JACOB

ZIV, JACOB (1931– ), electrical engineer. Born in Tiberias, Israel, Ziv received his B.Sc., Dip. Eng. (1954), and M.Sc. (1957), both in electrical engineering, from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa. From 1955 to 1959, he was a senior research engineer in the Scientific Department of the Israeli Ministry of Defense and was assigned to the research and development of communications systems. He was sent by the Israeli Ministry of Defense to Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his D.Sc. degree in 1962. From 1961 to 1962, while studying for his doctorate at MIT, he joined the Applied Science Division of Melpar, Inc., Watertown,   Mass., where he was a senior research engineer working in communications theory. In 1962 he returned to the Scientific Department of the Israeli Ministry of Defense as head of the Communications Division and was also an adjunct of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Technion. From 1968 to 1970 he was a member of the technical staff of Bell Laboratories, Inc., Murray Hill, N.J., where he also spent several sabbaticals in later years. He joined the Technion in 1970 and was appointed professor of electrical engineering. From 1974 to 1976, he was dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and vice president for academic affairs from 1978 to 1982. Upon his return full time to the Technion in 1970, he worked on a variety of problems in information theory, including the characterization of the complexity of an information source and the related problem of universal data compression. With Abraham Lempel he wrote a series of papers on the Lempel-Ziv algorithm. His research interests include data-compression, information theory, and statistical communication. In 1982 he was elected a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and appointed a Technion distinguished professor. In 1993 he was awarded the Israel Prize in exact sciences (engineering and technology). Among his many awards, he has twice been the recipient of the IEEE-Information Theory Best Paper Award (for 1977 and 1979). He is the recipient of the 1995 International Marconi Award, the 1995 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, in 1997 the Shanon Award from the Information Theory Society, and in 2002 the Rothschild Prize for technological sciences. He was chairman of the Israel Universities Planning and Grants Committee from 1985 to 1991 and served as the president of the Israel National Academy of Sciences and the Humanities. (Bracha Rager (2nd ed.)