Siavash Alamouti is an Iranian-born business executive, and entrepreneur. and

electrical engineer 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 ...

. He is the

Executive Vice President A vice president, also director in British English, is an officer in government or business who is below the president (chief executive officer) in rank. It can also refer to executive vice presidents, signifying that the vice president is on t ...

of Innovation R&D at

Wells Fargo Wells Fargo & Company is an American multinational financial services company with corporate headquarters in San Francisco, California; operational headquarters in Manhattan; and managerial offices throughout the United States and intern ...

, and the

executive chairman The chairperson, also chairman, chairwoman or chair, is the presiding officer of an organized group such as a board, committee, or deliberative assembly. The person holding the office, who is typically elected or appointed by members of the grou ...

of Mimik Technology, Inc. He is known for the 1998 invention of the ''Alamouti's code'', a type of

space–time block code In physics, spacetime is a mathematical model that combines the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional manifold. Spacetime diagrams can be used to visualize relativistic effects, such as why differen ...

Early life and education

Siavash Alamouti was born on March 16, 1962, in

Tehran, Iran Tehran (; fa, تهران ) is the largest city in Tehran Province and the Capital city, capital of Iran. With a population of around 9 million in the city and around 16 million in the larger metropolitan area of Greater Tehran, Tehran is th ...

. He graduated from Kharazmi Highschool in 1979. He attended

Sharif University of Technology Sharif University of Technology (SUT; fa, دانشگاه صنعتی شریف) is a public research university in Tehran, Iran. It is widely considered as the nation's most prestigious and leading institution for science, technology, engineering, ...

in 1980 for one year, and was expelled during the

Iranian Cultural Revolution The Cultural Revolution (1980–1983; fa, انقلاب فرهنگی: Enqelābe Farhangi) was a period following the Iranian Revolution, when the academia of Iran was purged of Western and non-Islamic influences (including traditionalist unpoli ...

. Alamouti received B.A.Sc. (1989) and M.A.Sc. (1992) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public university, public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks a ...

. He holds dual citizenship of Canada and the United States. Alamouti started his professional career at MPR Teltech, part of BC Telephone Company (now

Telus Telus Communications Inc. (TCI) is the wholly owned principal subsidiary of Telus Corporation, a Canadian national telecommunications company that provides a wide range of telecommunications products and services including internet access, voi ...

) in Vancouver, where he worked on early mobile data protocols, including cellular digital packet data (CDPD).

Career

In 1995, he joined

McCaw Cellular McCaw Cellular Communications was a cellular telephone pioneer in the United States. Savvy licensing of cellular spectrum in the early 1980s put McCaw Cellular in an extremely strong position, quickly outpacing the growth of the "Baby Bells" in t ...

(now AT&T Wireless) as a Senior Scientist where he worked on the physical and MAC layer design of United States’ first commercial OFDM/MIMO system, known as Project Angel. He worked at several other companies prior to 2004, including Vivato, Cadence, McCaw Cellular, and MPR Teltech. He was an Intel Fellow and the CTO of Mobile Wireless Group at

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

, starting in 2004. Alamouti supported Intel's Mobile

WiMAX Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) is a family of wireless broadband communication standards based on the IEEE 802.16 set of standards, which provide physical layer (PHY) and media access control (MAC) options. The WiMAX ...

technology. Siavash Alamouti was the Group R&D Director at Vodafone Group from March 2010 until 2013. He was awarded the 2022

Marconi Prize The Marconi Prize is an annual award recognizing achievements and advancements made in field of communications (radio, mobile, wireless, telecommunications, data communications, networks, and Internet). The prize is awarded by the Marconi Society a ...

Alamouti's code

He invented a 2xN MIMO scheme which today is referred to as the ''Alamouti's code'' (or ''Alamouti code''). Alamouti’s October 1998 paper in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas of Communications (volume 16, number 8) was selected by IEEE Communication Society for publication in, ''The Best of the Best: Fifty Years of Communications and Networking Research'' (2007). Alamouti's code provided some inspiration for the development of more valuable and general Space Time Block Codes by others, including Nambirajan Seshadri,

Vahid Tarokh Vahid Tarokh (; born ) is an Iranian-American electrical engineer, mathematician, computer scientist, and professor. Since 2018, he has served as a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a Professor of Mathematics, and the Rhodes Family ...

Robert Calderbank Robert Calderbank (born 28 December 1954) is a professor of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematics and director of the Information Initiative at Duke University. He received a BSc from Warwick University in 1975, an MSc ...

, and

Hamid Jafarkhani Hamid Jafarkhani ( fa, حمید جعفرخانی) (born 1966, in Tehran) is an Iranian-born American electrical engineer and professor. He serves as the Chancellor's Professor in electrical engineering and computer science in the Henry Samueli S ...

. Tarokh, Jafarkhani and Alamouti received the 2013 IEEE Eric E. Sumner award "For contributions to block signaling for multiple antennas".

References

Iranian emigrants to the United States Iranian engineers 21st-century Iranian inventors Living people Iranian chief technology officers Iranian expatriate academics 1962 births {{Iran-scientist-stub