Tom Richardson is Vice President of Engineering and leads R&D at Qualcomm’s New Jersey Research Center. Dr. Richardson gave the prestigious Jack Keil Wolf Lecture at Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications (CATT) at NYU Tandon School of Engineering on “Liquid Cloud Storage: A New Approach to Large Scale Data Storage”.  He talked about new large-scale data storage technology developed by a Qualcomm team that handles reliable distributed storage systems consisting of hundreds to tens of thousands of potentially unreliable storage nodes. This solution, developed by his team, offers exceptional object durability, minimizes storage overhead and repair traffic, and provides fast predictable access to data objects.

Dr. Richardson’s main research area is iterative coding systems. He is a co-author, with Ruediger Urbanke, of a book on the subject, entitled “Modern Coding Theory” and was co-winner of the 2002 and the 2013 Information Theory Paper award.  He is a Fellow of the IEEE, co-winner of the 2011 IEEE Koji Kobayashi award and the 2014 IEEE Hamming medal, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Jack Keil Wolf Lecture Series is in honor of an information theorist whose pivotal contributions to digital communication and data storage technology helped shape our networked world, was a member of the Electrical Engineering Department at New York University from 1963 to 1965, and the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now NYU Tandon School of Engineering) from 1965 to 1973. Dr. Wolf was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1993. He was the recipient of the 1990 E. H. Armstrong Achievement Award of the IEEE Communications Society and was co-recipient of the 1975 IEEE Information Theory Group Paper Award for the paper “Noiseless coding for correlated information sources” (co-authored with D. Slepian). He served on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Group from 1970 to 1976 and from 1980 to 1986. Dr. Wolf was President of the IEEE Information Theory Group in 1974. He was International Chairman of Committee C of URSI from 1980 to 1983.