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Gottfried Ungerboeck co-recipient of 1997 Australia Prize
 Canberra/Zurich,
February 11, 1997 -- The Australia Prize, which has helped boost
Australia's stocks in world science, is a prestigious international
award given by the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia for
outstanding achievements in a selected area of science and technology
promoting human welfare, this year for major contributions in telecommunications.
The Australian Science and Technology Minister Peter McGauran announced
the three winners of this year's Australia Prize today. They are
Allan Snyder of the Australian National University, Rodney Tucker
of the University of Melbourne, and IBM Fellow Gottfried Ungerboeck
of IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory. They will share a cash award
of $A 300,000.
"All three scientists, two Australians and one Austrian, have
played a pivotal role in establishing the modern international telecommunications
network. Take away the contribution of any of them and the network
would be inferior," Mr McGauran said. "Professor Snyder,
Head of the Australian National University's Optical Sciences Centre,
confounded the sceptics and gave industry access to ground-breaking
technology by providing the cornerstone research for the optical
fibre telecommunications network. In developing laser technology
to increase the network's carrying capacity by ten-fold, Professor
Tucker, Director of Melbourne University's Photonics Research Laboratory,
produced results previously only dreamed of. And without Dr Ungerboeck
of IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland, and his invention
of a coding system which enables high-speed transmission between
computer modems, the telecommunications revolution would have stalled
long ago. They are, all three, giants of telecommunications research
and very deserving of the Australia Prize," Mr McGauran said.
The 1997 Australia Prize was presented by the Australian Prime
Minister John Howard at a formal ceremony held in Canberra on February
11, 1997.
The work of Gottfried Ungerboeck
Gottfried Ungerboeck's system, originally invented for coding data
for transmission between computer modems, has had a major impact
on world telecommunications. The coding system he developed in the
late 1970s is now used in most systems for modern information transmission,
for example, in telephone modems, in satellite and terrestrial wireless
systems, for digital audio and TV broadcasting, in digital subscriber
loops designed for gaining access to the Internet and other services
via conventional telephone copper wires at megabit-per-second rates,
and so forth. The system, called trellis-coded modulation (TCM),
enables reliable data transmission over telephone lines and other
transmission media at far higher speeds than was ever thought possible.
Within years of its emergence, TCM became an industry standard.
It was first recommended in 1984 by the International Telecommunications
Union for use in high-speed telephone modems.
The Australia Prize is the latest award for the outstanding work
of Gottfried Ungerboeck who was named an IBM Fellow, the highest
internal recognition for a scientist, in 1984, and an IEEE Fellow
in 1985. His most recent distinctions include an honorary doctoral
degree from the Technical University in Vienna in 1993, the 1994
IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, the 1994 Eduard Rhein Prize for Basic
Science together with A.J. Viterbi, and the 1996 Marconi Fellowship
Award.
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