The 2011 Kailath Lecture


Sharing Adventures of an Amazing Journey from Academia to Qualcomm to a World with Over Five Billion Cellular Subscribers




Dr. Irwin M. Jacobs

Chairman and CEO, Emeritus, Qualcomm, Inc
Chair, National Academy of Engineering

Monday, November 14, 2011
2:00pm - 3:30pm
Mackenzie Room (300)
Huang Building
Engineering Quad, Stanford University

Abstract

After 13 rewarding years as Professor at MIT and UCSD, Dr. Jacobs left academia to apply lessons learned in information and communication theory to develop many innovative products as co-founder and CEO of first Linkabit and then Qualcomm. He will trace the history of CDMA from concept to the technology underlying all third generation cellular systems. Cellular phones, now used by over 5 billion subscribers worldwide, have evolved from simple telephony to powerful computers with always-on connectivity to the Internet and with position location, game-quality graphics, camera and camcorder capability, voice recognition, and now augmented reality. Beyond entertainment, they are key to economic growth and social change in developing and developed countries. He will describe several pilot projects initiated by Qualcomm in over 30 countries, including telemedicine, micro-finance, and 24/7 education.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Irwin Mark Jacobs (B.E., Cornell, 1956, Sc.D., MIT, 1959) co-founded QUALCOMM in 1985. As CEO through 2005 and Chairman through 2009, he led its growth to a company with now over 20 thousand employees worldwide. In the face of considerable skepticism, Qualcomm developed the CDMA mobile wireless technology, now used by over one billion consumers worldwide. Not only does he hold fourteen CDMA patents, but for 13 consecutive years, QUALCOMM has been on Fortune's list of The 100 Best Companies To Work For. Dr. Jacobs previously served as co-founder, CEO and chairman of LINKABIT Corporation, which merged in 1980 with M/A-COM, where he was executive vice president and a director until 1985. Over 100 San Diego communications companies trace their roots to LINKABIT.

From 1959 to 1966, Dr. Jacobs was an assistant, then associate professor of electrical engineering at MIT, where he co-authored with Jack Wozencraft a classic textbook in digital communications, Principles of Communications Engineering. From 1966 to 1972, he served as professor of computer science and engineering at UC San Diego.

He has received numerous industry, education and business awards, including the Presidential National Medal of Technology for extraordinary achievements in the commercialization of technology, election to the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Alexander Graham Bell Medal and the James Clark Maxwell Medal of the IEEE, several honorary degrees and most recently, the 2011 Marconi Society Fellowship & Prize.

Dr. Jacobs has been chair of the Board of Trustees of the Salk Institute since 2006 and chair of the National Academy of Engineering since July 2008. He is past chair of the UC President's Engineering Advisory Council and currently serves on the UCSD Foundation Board of Trustees, the Board of the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies of the U.S. Department of Education, the Innovation Advisory Board of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Dr. Jacobs and his wife, Joan, have been generous supporters of education and the arts. The Jacobs School of Engineering of UC San Diego has been named after them and they have been cited by Business Week and the Chronicle of Philanthropy as among the 50 Most-Generous Philanthropists in the United States.

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