Ken Laker, the 1999 IEEE president, died on 2 August on the age of 76.
Laker labored with the IEEE Board of Directors within the early Nineties to buy private computer systems for the group’s leaders to make it simpler to conduct IEEE enterprise through the Web. Later, he led the creation of the IEEE Digital Museum (now the Engineering and Technology History Wiki), a web-based repository of academic content material.
Additionally a philanthropist, he helped set up the annual IEEE Presidents’ Scholarship to acknowledge a deserving pupil whose challenge demonstrates an understanding {of electrical} or electronics engineering, pc science, or different IEEE discipline of curiosity. The US $10,000 scholarship is run by IEEE Educational Activities and is payable over 4 years of undergraduate college examine.
Laker was a member of the IEEE Heritage Circle, which acknowledges those that make ongoing and beneficiant donations to the IEEE Foundation, the organization’s philanthropic partner.
Along with sharing his time and skills with IEEE, he was a professor {of electrical} engineering for 35 years on the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.
He additionally was cofounder and chief government of DFT Microsystems, a semiconductor firm based mostly in Montreal.
Contributions at Bell Labs and at Penn
He acquired his bachelor’s diploma in electrical engineering in 1969 from Manhattan College, in Riverdale, N.Y. Whereas there, he accomplished the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program, which prepares college students to turn out to be leaders within the U.S. army. Upon commencement he was commissioned as a second lieutenant within the Air Force.
He went on to earn grasp’s and doctoral levels in EE in 1970 and 1973 from New York University, in New York Metropolis.
After graduating in 1973, Laker joined the Air Force Research Laboratory, in Bedford, Mass., as a researcher who investigated army purposes of surface acoustic wave units. He left in 1977 to affix Bell Labs, in Holmdel, N.J., as a member of the technical employees. He carried out and supervised analysis and growth of analog and digital application-specific built-in circuits.
Laker joined the College of Pennsylvania in 1984 as an EE professor. In the course of the subsequent three a long time, he carried out pioneering analysis in mixed-signal integration techniques and taught courses in very-large-scale integration circuits and techniques, in addition to management, engineering design, and mental property safety and administration.
He co-authored 4 textbooks on microelectronic techniques.
In 2000 he helped discovered DFT, which manufactured check tools for high-speed semiconductor interfaces. He served as its CEO for 2 years. He retired in 2019.
Introducing Internet-based providers
Laker joined IEEE in 1968 as an undergraduate. He later turned a member of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits and IEEE Circuits and Systems societies. He served because the 1983 CAS president.
In 1993, whereas serving as Division I director, he was concerned within the early phases of modernizing IEEE operations and processes with networked computer systems and Web entry.
He later was named chair of the brand new IEEE Digital Providers Steering Committee, which oversaw the acquisition of computer systems for all IEEE Board members to digitize hundreds of IEEE paperwork. Committee members additionally labored on the primary system to digitize IEEE’s membership renewal course of.
As IEEE president, Laker helped additional develop the group’s Internet-based providers. He labored with the IEEE Publication Services and Products Board to develop a blueprint for the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. IEEE Xplore, launched in Could 2000, stays a number one useful resource for scientific and technical data, offering on-line entry to the full-text variations of greater than 6 million documents.
Within the late Nineties, Laker joined the IEEE History Committee and labored with different volunteers to develop the IEEE Digital Museum, a Internet-based archive of articles, movies, and audio recordings highlighting vital technological developments. Later, that content material was migrated to IEEE’s Global History Network, which was changed in 2015 by the IEEE Engineering and Technology History Wiki.
In 1999 Laker labored with Peter Lewis, IEEE Basis director emeritus, to ascertain the annual IEEE Presidents’ Scholarship. Annually, a winner is chosen from college students who offered their initiatives on the Society for Science’s Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair. The newest scholarship was given to a teen who created a tool to detect glaucoma.
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