The IEEE Life Fellow is remembered as a founder of the field
The Liu family includes Bede Liu’s wife, Maria; his daughter, Beatrice; his sister, Jane Jernow; his brother, Hal Liu; and grandchildren Charles and Emily Lovett.
IEEE Life Fellow Bede Liu, a digital signal processing pioneer, died on 7 May. He was 91.
Bede Liu, adigital signal processingpioneer, died on 7 May. He was 91.
Liu was widely regarded as one of the founders of modern digitalsignal processing, a field that applies mathematicalalgorithmsto analyze, modify, and transmit signals including sound, images, and video.
The IEEE Life Fellow taughtelectrical engineeringatPrincetonfor more than 50 years. From 1994 to 1997, he chaired the university’selectrical and computer engineering department.
Liu’s research aided the transition from analog to digital processing of sound, images, and video. His work helped establish many of the mathematical and engineering techniques that underpin modern communications, multimedia systems, andconsumer electronics.
Although little known outside engineering circles, his work is embedded in technologies used by billions of people. The low-power digital signalprocessorsthat make cellphone calls, streaming video, and Internet communications possible can be traced to research he conducted in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Liu received the 2018IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medalfor “sustained contributions to the analysis and the development of low-complexity realizations of digital signal processing algorithms.”
“We stream music and video. We take photos with our phones, and we send them around. We don’t even think about it,” IEEE Life FellowH. Vincent Poorsaid in anobituary for Liu. “But it’s all because of the signal processing,image processing, and video processing that’s been developed over the years, as well as other technologies that have grown up beside it and enabled it, likesemiconductors. The development of these processing advances was exactly what Bede was a major part of.” Poor is a professor of electrical andcomputer engineeringat Princeton.
Liu was born in Shanghai in 1934. During his childhood, his family relocated toTaiwanamid the upheaval of theChinese Civil War. His father, Henry Liu Sr., was an electrical engineer.
Liu earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1954 from theNational Taiwan University, in Taipei. After graduating, he and his family moved to theUnited States. Liu and his father attended the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now theNew York University Tandon School of Engineering) together. They earned their master’s degrees in electrical engineering in 1956. Liu continued his studies at the school, earning a doctoral degree in electrical engineering four years later.