Academic and Industry Leaders Honor Irwin Jacobs at UCSD Symposium
|
10.20.03 -- On Saturday, October 18, QUALCOMM founder and chief executive officer Irwin Mark Jacobs turned 70 years old. The previous day, the San Diego technology leader and his wife Joan were on the UCSD campus at a symposium in his honor, attended by more than 500 faculty, students, and industry friends. The symposium was co-hosted by the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering, QUALCOMM, and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Calit²]. “Celebrating my 70th has sparked a lot of wonderful memories, but the great excitement is looking forward,” said honoree Jacobs. “I try to think about what might be happening over the next few years or decade, and people are always asking me, ‘Are there really any good things left to be done?’ And each year, I feel confident saying, ‘Yes, at least for the next decade,’ and that date keeps moving out.”
During the conference, speakers looked back at Irwin's academic and business career, and his impact on UCSD, San Diego, communications theory and the telecom industry. A panel of international experts led by Calit² director Larry Smarr also looked ahead to telecommunications in the “next 70 years.” Smarr took the opportunity to highlight the role Jacobs and his company played in the creation of the institute. “If it wasn’t for Irwin and for Qualcomm, we might not exist as an organization,” recalled Smarr. “When the governor made his initial challenge for the campuses to get two-to-one matching funds for the state’s $100 million capital investment, the one person who really understood and believed was Irwin. He not only gave us our grubstake with the first $15 million from Qualcomm, but he also issued a challenge to the rest of the corporate world.”
Continued Smarr: “That initial $15 million investment has increased 20-fold through the contributions of industry, the campuses and the federal government to Calit².”
“We were lucky to have Irwin on the engineering faculty during the university’s formative years,” said Jacobs School dean Frieder Seible, opening the forum. “His contributions touch many people, in every aspect of society, and his technical accomplishments span half a century.”
MIT professor emeritus Robert Gallager recalled his early years at MIT, where Jacobs did graduate school and taught for seven years, before joining UCSD in 1966. He focused on Jacobs’ strong interest in communication theory, arguing that it put Jacobs in a good position for his later innovations in industry. “All of the things Irwin has done since then,” said Gallager, “if you look at the major systems he has been the architect of, all of them come from the deep appreciation he had for what all this communication theory is about.”
Gallager also read remarks from another leading MIT information theorist, John Wozencraft, who co-authored “Principles of Communication Engineering” with Irwin Jacobs.
Speaking about the years when Irwin Jacobs was on the UCSD faculty, Electrical and Computer Engineering professor Jack Keil Wolf noted that Jacobs was instrumental in creating a series of courses focused on computing, at a time when the department still had a strong physics orientation. “The courses Irwin introduced at UCSD became central to the success of the companies he led,” noted Wolf. “He was one of the very early people to understand how microprocessors can be used in engineering.”
In a video tribute, recently-retired UC President Richard Atkinson and his successor (and former UCSD Chancellor) Robert Dynes talked about Jacobs' role in expanding engineering not just in San Diego, but throughout the UC system. Also quoted in the video: former Federal Communications Commission chairman Reed Hundt; San Diego Telecom Council president Martha Dennis; and Andrew Viterbi, co-founder of both Linkabit and QUALCOMM. “Leadership, innovation, brilliant ideas,” said Viterbi, when asked what traits characterize Irwin Jacobs. “He also was capable before any of the rest of us engineers to fully understand business and financial details. So he’s a Renaissance man.”
Two other former industry colleagues of Jacobs assessed his impact as an engineer-turned-entrepreneur, first as founder of Linkabit (in 1968) and later of QUALCOMM (in 1985). Harvey White, who worked at Linkabit and co-founded QUALCOMM, is now CEO of Leap Wireless (spun off from QUALCOMM in 1998). Talking about lessons he learned from Jacobs, White said “Irwin would always be willing to give up some of the upside in order to protect the downside.” “But he also taught me that you don’t compromise on those things you really believe in,” continued White. “There would be no CDMA today if he had been willing to compromise.”
Robert Kahn is CEO of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, and currently sits on QUALCOMM’s Board of Directors. “We all know about Irwin’s technical abilities and his keen intuition,” said Kahn. “But he also has remarkably good business instincts. Every board meeting is a comprehensive course in some new aspect of business – about strategy, or finance, or foreign policy.”
The roundtable on the future of telecommunications featured panelists with very different backgrounds in the field. Donna Dubinsky is CEO of Handspring, Inc., a maker of mobile devices based on Qualcomm’s CDMA technology. “We sell smart phones that are as much computers as they are cell phones,” she said. “The future of cell phones is as data devices, but unlike the PC world, there will be multiple platforms, not a monolithic platform, and there will be multiple platform layers. And these mobile devices will be deeply integrated into networks and the enterprise.”
Former Bell Labs and Telcordia Technologies research scientist Robert Lucky commented that the future of “digital ubiquity” will only be constrained by legal or societal concerns. “From mobile devices you could have access to all the music, movies or text in the world, from wherever you are,” he said. “But copyright and ownership laws stand in the way of that future.” Lucky also reminded the audience that working on “killer apps” may not be the best investment for companies. “Industry didn’t see the Internet or the Web coming,” he reminded the audience. “How could we not have had the vision of something like that? It was never hanging out there like the Dick Tracy phone.”
Also on the panel: the man who led South Korea’s push into advanced wireless communications by committing the country to adopting CDMA as a national standard. Former Information and Communications Minister Seungtaik Yang, who worked at Bell Labs in the 1960s, noted that “Korea followed in Irwin’s footsteps and found confidence in technology.” He also predicted that it is only a matter of time until voice over IP (VoIP) becomes much cheaper than voice over wire—and “video on demand should drop to two or three dollars for 30 minutes of multimedia access to the Internet from mobile devices.”
After the panel discussion. Jacobs School dean Frieder Seible presented Irwin Jacobs with an ‘intellectual portfolio.’ Compiled by Computer Science and Engineering chair Ramamohan Paturi, the portfolio is a collection of all of Jacobs’ published works, keynote speeches, patents, students’ papers, and major awards. The CD represents only part of the collection that will amount to numerous bound volumes for the Jacobs’ library. “As all of the speakers have so eloquently stated today,” Seible told Jacobs, “you have helped define information theory and fathered an entire industry.”
Responding to the gift and the previous talks, the QUALCOMM founder was clearly moved, recalling anecdotes from his years at MIT, UCSD, Linkabit and QUALCOMM. He was also upbeat about the future of mobile computing and wireless phones, giving much of the credit to Moore’s Law. “That’s why cell phones have become so powerful,” said Jacobs. “We used to use several chips to make CDMA work. Now, it’s a fraction of one chip, and most of those transistors are now going into computing, or into GPS receivers, multi-megapixel cameras, video coding and decoding, and so on. These devices will allow one to download all kinds of new capabilities into this tremendous mobile computing platform.”
Jacobs also recalled how his experience at MIT affected his view of Calit². “At MIT, they had the Research Laboratory of Electronics. It was a large blanket grant, so you could get a lot of researchers together and a lot of great things came out of that,” Jacobs told attendees. “That type of research model has largely been abandoned. So when the governor raised the possibility of allowing the different campuses to complete to have these major centers on them, that resonated with me. I don’t think any of us has a great idea of what will come out of the institute, but when you give people the opportunity, great things do indeed happen.”
The following video clips can now be viewed online (using RealPlayer or RealOne):
Irwin Jacobs’ remarks
Frieder Seible’s opening remarks
Video tribute