IEEE Signal Processing and Communications Atlanta Joint Chapter Meeting
Prof. Fredric J. Harris
San Diego State University, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

"A Short History of Radio"

Abstract: The history of radio is a remarkable account of a disruptive technology that truly changed the world. What a remarkable idea, communications at a distance (communicating faster than a man or woman can run). It is a concept that nearly eclipses the wonders of tomorrow foretold by the famous futurists such as H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. It is the stuff of science fiction made real! Radio and its progeny; television, satellites, cell phones, Zigbee, radar, and others, have had, and continue to have,
enormous social, political, and economic impact on us all.
This presentation is a non-technical walk along a technology path with acknowledgements to familiar names of scientists, inventors, innovators, and industrialists with light reflections of their contributions to the discoveries and developments that have taken us through an unfinished journey that started 190 years ago. At one level, radio is circuits, equations, vacuum tubes, transistors, amplifiers, antennae, and modulation theory. At another level it is a fascinating record of people whose contributions have brought us the applied magic we call radio. Do the names Oersted, Faraday, Maxwell, Helmholtz, Hertz, Marconi, Poulsen, de Forest, Armstrong, Popoff, Sarnoff, and Shannon, sound familiar? Join us in this fun walk down memory lane to gently prod your recollections of these giants who have come before us.

"Multirate Digital Signal Processing"

Digital Signal Processing has become essential to the design and implementation of high performance audio, video, multi-media, and software-defined radio signal processing. One of the essential drivers for cost-effective implementation of DSP algorithms is the multirate filter. Many of us (mistakenly) believe that digital filters are simply sampled data counterparts of linear time-invariant analog prototype filters. The digital world is richer than this and offers us easy access to filters with time varying coefficients. Such filters offer very efficient structures to perform digital filtering, spectral translation, interpolation, and decimation with both non-recursive and with recursive structures. This half-day presentation presents the essentials of multi-rate filtering along with
applications and numerous Matlab demonstrations.

Speaker Biography:

Prof. fred harris holds the Signal Processing Chair of the Communication Systems and Signal Processing Institute at San Diego State University where since 1967 he has taught courses in Digital Signal Processing and Communication Systems. He holds a number of patents on digital receiver and DSP technology and lectures throughout the world on DSP applications. Prof. harris is a consultant and author of over 150 journal and conference papers as well as chapters in books. Prof. harris became a Fellow of the IEEE in 2003, cited for contributions of DSP to communications systems. In 2006 he received the Software Defined Radio Forum’s “Industry Achievement Award”. His 2006 paper to the SDR conference was selected for the best paper award. The spelling of his name with all lower case letters is a source of distress for typists and spell checkers. A child at heart, Prof. harris collects toy trains and old slide-rules.