Axis Semiconductor

Technical Advisory Board

Professor Alan V. Oppenheim is a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received the S.B. and S.M. degrees in 1961 and the Sc.D. degree in 1964, all in electrical engineering, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University, which was conferred upon him in 1995.

In 1964, Professor Oppenheim joined the faculty at MIT, where he is currently Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow. Since 1967 he has been affiliated with MIT Lincoln Laboratory and since 1977 with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. His research interests are in the general area of signal processing and its applications. He is coauthor of the widely used textbooks Discrete-Time Signal Processing and Signals and Systems. He is also editor of several advanced books on signal processing.

Dr. Oppenheim is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the IEEE, a member of Sigma Xi and Eta Kappa Nu. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Sackler Fellow at Tel Aviv University. He has also received a number of awards for outstanding research and teaching, including the IEEE Education Medal, the IEEE Centennial Award, the Society Award, the Technical Achievement Award and the Senior Award of the IEEE Society on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. In 2007 Professor Oppenheim received the IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal. He has also received a number of awards at MIT for excellence in teaching, including the Bose Award and the Everett Moore Baker Award.

Dr. Robert Rines

A prolific inventor and musical composer, Dr. Rines is an accomplished international patent attorney and professor of law. A major supporter of inventors and defender of inventor's rights, Dr. Rines has assisted hundreds of inventors over the last 50 years. His patents now number more than 100, primarily for electronic apparatus to improve the resolution of radar and sonar scanning. The scanning systems used to locate the wrecks of the Titanic and the Bismarck were dependent on Dr. Rines' prototypes.

Born in 1922 in Boston, MA, Dr. Rines earned a BS in physics in 1942 from MIT where he has taught since 1963. He joined the US Army Signal Corps during World War II as a radar officer, serving in both Europe and the Pacific, and invented the modulation technique essential in building the Army's then top-secret Microwave Early Warning System. After the War, Dr. Rines worked as an examiner in the U. S. Patent Office while earning his law degree from Georgetown University in 1947, and later joined his father's law practice in Boston. He completed his PhD thesis at Chiao Tung University, Taiwan in 1972.

In 1963, Dr. Rines founded the Academy of Applied Science, a New Hampshire-based, private, nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion of science and technology education. In 1973, he founded Franklin Pierce Law Center. In 1994,Dr. Rines was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He has used his advanced scanning technology in search of Scotland's Loch Ness monster, first in the early 1970's and again in 1997.

Dr. Rines has written music for more than 10 Broadway and off-Broadway shows. He has been Gordon McKay Lecturer on Patent Law at Harvard and Lecturer on Invention, Patents, and Innovation at M.I.T. He has served on the Technical Advisory Board of the U.S. Department of Commerce. He also helped establish an invention-encouraging patent system in mainland China.