Victor B. Lawrence (born May 10, 1945, in Accra, Ghana) is a Ghanaian-American engineer credited with seminal contributions in digital signal processing for multimedia communications. During his 30-plus-year tenure at Bell Laboratories, Dr. Lawrence made extensive and fundamental personal contributions to voice, data, audio and video communications. He led numerous projects that significantly improved or enhanced every phase in the evolution of early low-speed and today's high-speed data communications. He is a Research Professor and Director of the Center for Intelligent Networked Systems (iNetS) at Stevens Institute of Technology, where he also served as Associate Dean. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2016. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to the understanding of quantization effects in digital signal processors and the applications of digital signal processing to data communications, a Fellow of AT&T Bell Labs, and a Charter Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.
Career
Upon graduation, Lawrence worked as a development engineer in the United Kingdom and then spent two semesters lecturing at Kumasi University of Science and Technology, now Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, in Ghana. Lawrence joined Bell Laboratories in 1974 and served in a number of roles over a 30-plus-year career at AT&T: as Supervisor in Data Communications Equipment Laboratory, Department head of Data Communication Research, Director of Advanced Multimedia Communications, and Vice President of Advanced Communications Technology before. Beginning in 1996, Lawrence lectured for several years at the Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy, formerly the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. As a visiting professor, he taught signal processing and data networking courses at the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University, Princeton University, Columbia University, and University of California, Berkeley. Lawrence also taught courses in Technology Management and Technology Incubation at Bell Laboratories to new engineers.
In 2005, Lawrence was appointed Director of the Center for Intelligent Networked Systems, and was named Associate Dean and Charles Batchelor Chair Professor of Engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He has co-authored five books: Introduction to Digital Filters, Tutorials on Modem Communications, Intelligent Broadband Multimedia Networks, Design and Engineering of Intelligent Communications Systems, and The Art of Scientific Innovation. Lawrence holds more than twenty U.S. and international patents and has had more than forty-five papers in referenced journals and conference proceedings, covering the topics of digital signal processing and data communications.
Contributions
1. Digital Signal Processing Leading the Transition from Analog to Digital Networks
Lawrence's innovations in the fields of digital signal processing and data communications helped drive the transition from analog to digital networks. When he started work in the 1970s, data transmission speeds over the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) were limited to 300 bit/s; today speeds over copper are in the Gbps range. Lawrence's technical innovations and achievements have contributed significantly to this evolution. In the mid-1970s, he improved the design of digital filters, including the invention of bias-less rounding arithmetic. This technique, which is used to suppress oscillations and stabilize both fixed and adaptive digital filters, is implemented in most digital signal processing (DSP) chips on the market today. He performed the early analysis, reduction to practice, and the first real-time implementation, through which he discovered the existence of unexpected large-amplitude and very-long-period limit cycles. This work, which resulted in two patents (Patents #4,213,187 and #4,034,197) and the Best Paper Award of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, has had a profound impact on the development of digital signal processors. These techniques were implemented in oscillators, tone detectors and generators used in digital telephone systems, PBXs and central office switches. In 1979, Lawrence implemented the first 9600 bit/s modem on a programmable digital signal processor, which operated in real time. In 1980, he co-invented multidimensional signal constellations, for which he received a patent, #4,457,004.
This work and related patents led to Lawrence's induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2016.