Prof. Lampel was a partner in the development of the Lampel-Ziv algorithm, an algorithm that changed the world of compression and is considered one of the most significant technological breakthroughs achieved in the State of Israel and in the history of the Technion by its researchers
The Technion mourns the death of the late Professor Emeritus Avraham Lampel from the Taub Faculty of Computer Science and shares in the grief of the family. Prof. Lampel was a partner in the development of the Lampel-Ziv algorithm, an algorithm that changed the world of compression and is considered one of the most significant technological breakthroughs achieved in the State of Israel and in the history of the Technion by its researchers.
Prof. Lampel, born in Poland (1936), began studying at the Technion in 1959 and completed his three academic degrees in 8 years. He taught electrical engineering and computer science at the Technion and in 1984-1981 served as the dean of the Taub Computer Science Faculty. In 1993 he was recruited to HP Laboratories and a year later he founded and managed HP Laboratories Israel. He was an IEEE fellow and a senior fellow at HP and HP registered eight patents in his name in the United States.
In 1977 Prof. Lampel, with his research colleague Prof. Yaakov Ziv from the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, published LZ7, the first version of Lempel-Ziu algorithm, and in 1979 the second version 79LZ. Both versions, under the nickname LZ algorithm, served as a basis for essential compression technologies such as TIFF, PNG, ZIP and GIF and played a central role in the PDF (for documents) and MP3 (for music) formats. This is an algorithm for compressing information that allows compression without loss of information (lossless compression), and without prior knowledge of the statistical properties of the information. Many of the compression technologies used today on the Internet in memory devices, computers and communications were developed on the basis of the algorithm. The impact of the algorithm is evident in the companies that develop technology and reaches all end users, including the billions of cell phone users.
In 2004, the International Association of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) declared that the Lampell-Ziu algorithm is "a milestone in electronics and computer engineering". The president of the union removed the lot from the sign indicating this, and it reads that "the algorithm for compressing information developed by Avraham Lampel and Yaakov Ziv in this place, in the years 1977-79, enables the transmission of information efficiently via the Internet. The algorithm made a significant contribution to the transformation of the Internet into an effective means of global communication."
The president of the Technion, Prof. Uri Sion, paid tribute to him and said that "the late Prof. Emeritus Lampel was a source of inspiration for all of us, and was among the greatest researchers that the Technion produced in its hundred years. The Lempel-Ziu algorithm contributed to the world, free of charge, an unprecedented technology that enables the transfer of information quickly and without loss of information. In his professional life, Prof. Lampel embodied the connection between deepening in basic science and excelling in applied research. There are few researchers whose research has had such a wide impact on technological progress and our daily lives. Of blessed memory."
Prof. Lampel has won dozens of prestigious awards and honors over the years, including the IEEE Golden Jubilee Award for technological innovation, the ACM Award for Theory and Application, the IEEE Hamming Medal and the Rothschild Award.
According to ACM, the most important association in the fields of computing and computer science, "the impact of the work of Professors Lampel and Ziv is so enormous that the current research in the field is still as vibrant as it was decades ago, and every year we see more theoreticians and applied researchers engaged in the expansion and development of the elegant idea that the two presented. It is not an exaggeration to say that the compression technologies that resulted from Lampel and Ziv's research accelerated the applications in mobile computing and multimedia and made them economically viable."
