Punya Thitimajshima (9 November 1955 – 9 May 2006), a

Thai Thai or THAI may refer to: * Of or from Thailand, a country in Southeast Asia ** Thai people, the dominant ethnic group of Thailand ** Thai language, a Tai-Kadai language spoken mainly in and around Thailand *** Thai script *** Thai (Unicode block ...

professor in the department of

telecommunications Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that fe ...

engineering at King Mongkut's Institute of Technology at Ladkrabang, was the co-inventor with Claude Berrou and Alain Glavieux of a groundbreaking coding scheme called

turbo code In information theory, turbo codes (originally in French ''Turbocodes'') are a class of high-performance forward error correction (FEC) codes developed around 1990–91, but first published in 1993. They were the first practical codes to closely ...

s. Thitimajshima was educated at King Mongkut's Institute of Technology at Ladkrabang, where he earned his bachelor's degree in

control engineering Control engineering or control systems engineering is an engineering discipline that deals with control systems, applying control theory to design equipment and systems with desired behaviors in control environments. The discipline of controls o ...

and master's degree in

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

. Later he went to

École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Bretagne École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France * École, Savoi ...

and Universite de Bretagne Occidentale in

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

, where he studied

engineering and received a doctoral degree in 1993 for a dissertation titled "Systematic recursive

convolutional code In telecommunication, a convolutional code is a type of error-correcting code that generates parity symbols via the sliding application of a boolean polynomial function to a data stream. The sliding application represents the 'convolution' of t ...

s and their application to parallel concatenation." Thitimajshima joined the faculty of

KMITL King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang (KMITL or KMIT Ladkrabang for short) is a research and educational institution in Thailand. It is situated in Lat Krabang District, Bangkok approximately 30 km east of the city center. The u ...

in 1995 as a lecturer, and became associate professor. He was the recipient of the 1998 Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the

IEEE Information Theory Society The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

together with Berrou and Glavieux. In 2003 he received the Outstanding Technologist Award presented by the Foundation for Promotion of Science and Technology under the Patronage of His Majesty the King of Thailand. He died on 9 May 2006 at the age of 51 from illness.

References

External links

King Mongkut's Institute of Technology at Ladkrabang

1955 births 2006 deaths Telecommunications in Thailand Punya Thitimajshima Information theorists Telecommunications engineers Electrical engineers 20th-century engineers {{Thailand-bio-stub