Alan V. Oppenheim

Biography

Alan V. Oppenheim is considered one of the early pioneers of digital signal processing (DSP) as well as an innovator and teacher. He is recognized in the field for his contributions to DSP and their impact on a wide variety of areas including speech compression and recognition, seismic signal processing, artificial intelligence, and communications systems.

His research has impacted virtually every area of DSP and his early work on homomorphic systems played a key role in many of the digital signal advancements that were to follow. He was a key originator of the complex cepstrum and its mathematical formulation, which found widespread use in speech and seismic processing and remains, to this day, a foundation of speech coding systems. The textbook “Discrete-Time Signal Processing,” which he co-authored with colleague Ronald W. Schafer, has been a widely used teaching and reference tool.

Dr. Oppenheim joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1964. He currently holds the position of Ford Professor of Engineering and is a MacVicar Faculty Fellow. He is also affiliated with MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

An IEEE Life Fellow, Dr. Oppenheim is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has been a Guggenheim Fellow. He has also been a Sackler Fellow at Tel Aviv University. Dr. Oppenheim received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from MIT. He has received a number of awards for outstanding research and teaching, including the IEEE Education Medal, the IEEE Centennial Award, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal, as well as the Education Award, Society Award, Technical Achievement Award and Senior Award of the IEEE Society on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing.