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The world of magic had Houdini, who pioneered methods which can be nonetheless carried out immediately. And knowledge compression has Jacob Ziv.

In 1977, Ziv, working with Abraham Lempel, printed the equal of
Houdini on Magic: a paper within the IEEE Transactions on Info Principle titled “A Universal Algorithm for Sequential Data Compression.” The algorithm described within the paper got here to be known as LZ77—from the authors’ names, in alphabetical order, and the yr. LZ77 wasn’t the primary lossless compression algorithm, but it surely was the primary that might work its magic in a single step.

The next yr, the 2 researchers issued a refinement, LZ78. That algorithm grew to become the idea for the Unix compress program used within the early ’80s; WinZip and Gzip, born within the early ’90s; and the GIF and TIFF picture codecs. With out these algorithms, we might doubtless be mailing massive knowledge recordsdata on discs as a substitute of sending them throughout the Web with a click on, shopping for our music on CDs as a substitute of streaming it, and taking a look at Fb feeds that do not have bouncing animated pictures.

Ziv went on to accomplice with different researchers on different improvements in compression. It’s his full physique of labor, spanning greater than half a century, that earned him the
2021 IEEE Medal of Honor “for elementary contributions to info principle and knowledge compression expertise, and for distinguished analysis management.”

Ziv was born in 1931 to Russian immigrants in Tiberias, a metropolis then in British-ruled Palestine and now a part of Israel. Electrical energy and devices—and little else—fascinated him as a toddler. Whereas training violin, for instance, he got here up with a scheme to show his music stand right into a lamp. He additionally tried to construct a Marconi transmitter from metallic player-piano elements. When he plugged the contraption in, the whole home went darkish. He by no means did get that transmitter to work.

When the Arab-Israeli Struggle started in 1948, Ziv was in highschool. Drafted into the Israel Protection Forces, he served briefly on the entrance traces till a bunch of moms held organized protests, demanding that the youngest troopers be despatched elsewhere. Ziv’s reassignment took him to the Israeli Air Pressure, the place he educated as a radar technician. When the warfare ended, he entered Technion—Israel Institute of Expertise to check electrical engineering.

After finishing his grasp’s diploma in 1955, Ziv returned to the protection world, this time becoming a member of Israel’s Nationwide Protection Analysis Laboratory (now
Rafael Superior Protection Techniques) to develop digital elements to be used in missiles and different navy techniques. The difficulty was, Ziv recollects, that not one of the engineers within the group, together with himself, had greater than a fundamental understanding of electronics. Their electrical engineering training had targeted extra on energy techniques.

“We had about six individuals, and we needed to train ourselves,” he says. “We’d decide a e-book after which examine collectively, like non secular Jews learning the Hebrew Bible. It wasn’t sufficient.”

The group’s purpose was to construct a telemetry system utilizing transistors as a substitute of vacuum tubes. They wanted not solely information, however elements. Ziv contacted Bell Phone Laboratories and requested a free pattern of its transistor; the corporate despatched 100.

“That coated our wants for a couple of months,” he says. “I give myself credit score for being the primary one in Israel to do one thing critical with the transistor.”

In 1959, Ziv was chosen as one among a handful of researchers from Israel’s protection lab to check overseas. That program, he says, reworked the evolution of science in Israel. Its organizers did not steer the chosen younger engineers and scientists into explicit fields. As a substitute, they allow them to pursue any sort of graduate research in any Western nation.

“With the intention to run a pc program on the time, you had to make use of punch playing cards and I hated them. That’s the reason I did not go into actual laptop science.”

Ziv deliberate to proceed working in communications, however he was now not curious about simply the {hardware}. He had lately learn
Info Principle (Prentice-Corridor, 1953), one of many earliest books on the subject, by Stanford Goldman, and he determined to make info principle his focus. And the place else would one examine info principle however MIT, the place Claude Shannon, the sphere’s pioneer, had began out?

Ziv arrived in Cambridge, Mass., in 1960. His Ph.D. analysis concerned a technique of figuring out how you can encode and decode messages despatched by way of a loud channel, minimizing the likelihood and error whereas on the similar time preserving the decoding easy.

“Info principle is gorgeous,” he says. “It tells you what’s the finest that you could ever obtain, and [it] tells you how you can approximate the end result. So should you make investments the computational effort, you possibly can know you might be approaching the perfect final result doable.”

Ziv contrasts that certainty with the uncertainty of a deep-learning algorithm. It might be clear that the algorithm is working, however no one actually is aware of whether or not it’s the finest outcome doable.

Whereas at MIT, Ziv held a part-time job at U.S. protection contractor
Melpar, the place he labored on error-correcting software program. He discovered this work much less lovely. “With the intention to run a pc program on the time, you had to make use of punch playing cards,” he recollects. “And I hated them. That’s the reason I did not go into actual laptop science.”

Again on the Protection Analysis Laboratory after two years in america, Ziv took cost of the Communications Division. Then in 1970, with a number of different coworkers, he joined the college of Technion.

There he met Abraham Lempel. The 2 mentioned making an attempt to enhance lossless knowledge compression.

The state-of-the-art in lossless knowledge compression on the time was Huffman coding. This strategy begins by discovering sequences of bits in a knowledge file after which sorting them by the frequency with which they seem. Then the encoder builds a dictionary wherein the commonest sequences are represented by the smallest variety of bits. This is similar concept behind Morse code: Essentially the most frequent letter within the English language, e, is represented by a single dot, whereas rarer letters have extra complicated mixtures of dots and dashes.

Huffman coding, whereas nonetheless used immediately within the MPEG-2 compression format and a lossless type of JPEG, has its drawbacks. It requires two passes by way of a knowledge file: one to calculate the statistical options of the file, and the second to encode the info. And storing the dictionary together with the encoded knowledge provides to the dimensions of the compressed file.

Ziv and Lempel questioned if they might develop a lossless data-compression algorithm that might work on any sort of knowledge, didn’t require preprocessing, and would obtain the perfect compression for that knowledge, a goal outlined by one thing referred to as the Shannon entropy. It was unclear if their purpose was even doable. They determined to seek out out.

Ziv says he and Lempel had been the “good match” to sort out this query. “I knew all about info principle and statistics, and Abraham was effectively outfitted in Boolean algebra and laptop science.”

The 2 got here up with the concept of getting the algorithm search for distinctive sequences of bits on the similar time that it is compressing the info, utilizing tips that could consult with beforehand seen sequences. This strategy requires just one move by way of the file, so it is quicker than Huffman coding.

Ziv explains it this fashion: “You have a look at incoming bits to seek out the longest stretch of bits for which there’s a match previously. As an example that first incoming bit is a 1. Now, since you might have just one bit, you might have by no means seen it previously, so you don’t have any alternative however to transmit it as is.”

“However then you definately get one other bit,” he continues. “Say that is a 1 as effectively. So that you enter into your dictionary 1-1. Say the subsequent bit is a 0. So in your dictionary you now have 1-1 and in addition 1-0.”

This is the place the pointer is available in. The following time that the stream of bits features a 1-1 or a 1-0, the software program would not transmit these bits. As a substitute it sends a pointer to the placement the place that sequence first appeared, together with the size of the matched sequence. The variety of bits that you just want for that pointer may be very small.

“Info principle is gorgeous. It tells you what’s the finest that you could ever obtain, and (it) tells you how you can approximate the end result.”

“It is principally what they used to do in publishing
TV Information,” Ziv says. “They might run a synopsis of every program as soon as. If this system appeared greater than as soon as, they did not republish the synopsis. They only mentioned, return to web page x.”

Decoding on this method is even easier, as a result of the decoder would not need to determine distinctive sequences. As a substitute it finds the places of the sequences by following the pointers after which replaces every pointer with a replica of the related sequence.

The algorithm did every thing Ziv and Lempel had got down to do—it proved that universally optimum lossless compression with out preprocessing was doable.

“On the time they printed their work, the truth that the algorithm was crisp and chic and was simply implementable with low computational complexity was virtually inappropriate,” says Tsachy Weissman, {an electrical} engineering professor at Stanford College who focuses on info principle. “It was extra in regards to the theoretical outcome.”

Finally, although, researchers acknowledged the algorithm’s sensible implications, Weissman says. “The algorithm itself grew to become actually helpful when our applied sciences began coping with bigger file sizes past 100,000 and even 1,000,000 characters.”

“Their story is a narrative in regards to the energy of elementary theoretical analysis,” Weissman provides. “You possibly can set up theoretical outcomes about what must be achievable—and a long time later humanity advantages from the implementation of algorithms primarily based on these outcomes.”

Ziv and Lempel saved engaged on the expertise, making an attempt to get nearer to entropy for small knowledge recordsdata. That work led to LZ78. Ziv says LZ78 appears just like LZ77 however is definitely very totally different, as a result of it anticipates the subsequent bit. “As an example the primary bit is a 1, so that you enter within the dictionary two codes, 1-1 and 1-0,” he explains. You possibly can think about these two sequences as the primary branches of a tree.”

“When the second bit comes,” Ziv says, “if it is a 1, you ship the pointer to the primary code, the 1-1, and if it is 0, you level to the opposite code, 1-0. And then you definately prolong the dictionary by including two extra potentialities to the chosen department of the tree. As you do this repeatedly, sequences that seem extra incessantly will develop longer branches.”

“It seems,” he says, “that not solely was that the optimum [approach], however so easy that it grew to become helpful immediately.”

Jacob Ziv (left) and Abraham Lempel printed algorithms for lossless knowledge compression in 1977 and 1978, each within the IEEE Transactions on Info Principle. The strategies grew to become referred to as LZ77 and LZ78 and are nonetheless in use immediately.Picture: Jacob Ziv/Technion

Whereas Ziv and Lempel had been engaged on LZ78, they had been each on sabbatical from Technion and dealing at U.S. firms. They knew their growth can be commercially helpful, and so they needed to patent it.

“I used to be at Bell Labs,” Ziv recollects, “and so I assumed the patent ought to belong to them. However they mentioned that it isn’t doable to get a patent until it is a piece of {hardware}, and so they weren’t curious about making an attempt.” (The U.S. Supreme Courtroom did not open the door to direct patent safety for software program till the Eighties.)

Nonetheless, Lempel’s employer, Sperry Rand Corp., was keen to strive. It received across the restriction on software program patents by constructing {hardware} that carried out the algorithm and patenting that gadget. Sperry Rand adopted that first patent with a model tailored by researcher Terry Welch, known as the LZW algorithm. It was the LZW variant that unfold most generally.

Ziv regrets not with the ability to patent LZ78 instantly, however, he says, “We loved the truth that [LZW] was extremely popular. It made us well-known, and we additionally loved the analysis it led us to.”

One idea that adopted got here to be known as Lempel-Ziv complexity, a measure of the variety of distinctive substrings contained in a sequence of bits. The less distinctive substrings, the extra a sequence will be compressed.

This measure later got here for use to verify the safety of encryption codes; if a code is actually random, it can’t be compressed. Lempel-Ziv complexity has additionally been used to research electroencephalograms—recordings {of electrical} exercise within the mind—to
determine the depth of anesthesia, to diagnose depression, and for different functions. Researchers have even utilized it to analyze pop lyrics, to find out tendencies in repetitiveness.

Over his profession, Ziv printed some 100 peer-reviewed papers. Whereas the 1977 and 1978 papers are essentially the most well-known, info theorists that got here after Ziv have their very own favorites.

For Shlomo Shamai, a distinguished professor at Technion, it is the 1976 paper that launched
the Wyner-Ziv algorithm, a method of characterizing the bounds of utilizing supplementary info obtainable to the decoder however not the encoder. That downside emerges, for instance, in video functions that benefit from the truth that the decoder has already deciphered the earlier body and thus it may be used as facet info for encoding the subsequent one.

For Vincent Poor, a professor {of electrical} engineering at Princeton College, it is the 1969 paper describing
the Ziv-Zakai bound, a method of figuring out whether or not or not a sign processor is getting essentially the most correct info doable from a given sign.

Ziv additionally impressed numerous main data-compression consultants by way of the lessons he taught at Technion till 1985. Weissman, a former pupil, says Ziv “is deeply passionate in regards to the mathematical great thing about compression as a option to quantify info. Taking a course from him in 1999 had an enormous half in setting me on the trail of my very own analysis.”

He wasn’t the one one so impressed. “I took a category on info principle from Ziv in 1979, at the start of my grasp’s research,” says Shamai. “Greater than 40 years have handed, and I nonetheless keep in mind the course. It made me keen to have a look at these issues, to do analysis, and to pursue a Ph.D.”

In recent times, glaucoma has taken away most of Ziv’s imaginative and prescient. He says {that a} paper printed in IEEE Transactions on Info Principle this January is his final. He’s 89.

“I began the paper two and a half years in the past, once I nonetheless had sufficient imaginative and prescient to make use of a pc,” he says. “On the finish, Yuval Cassuto, a youthful college member at Technion, completed the mission.” The paper discusses conditions wherein massive info recordsdata have to be transmitted shortly to distant databases.

As Ziv explains it, such a necessity could come up when a physician needs to check a affected person’s DNA pattern to previous samples from the identical affected person, to find out if there was a mutation, or to a library of DNA, to find out if the affected person has a genetic illness. Or a researcher learning a brand new virus could wish to evaluate its DNA sequence to a DNA database of recognized viruses.

“The issue is that the quantity of knowledge in a DNA pattern is large,” Ziv says, “an excessive amount of to be despatched by a community immediately in a matter of hours and even, typically, in days. If you’re, say, making an attempt to determine viruses which can be altering in a short time in time, that could be too lengthy.”

The strategy he and Cassuto describe entails utilizing recognized sequences that seem generally within the database to assist compress the brand new knowledge, with out first checking for a particular match between the brand new knowledge and the recognized sequences.

“I actually hope that this analysis is perhaps used sooner or later,” Ziv says. If his observe document is any indication, Cassuto-Ziv—or maybe CZ21—will add to his legacy.

This text seems within the Could 2021 print difficulty as “Conjurer of Compression.”