Oral-History:Bishnu Atal

About Bishnu Atal

Bishnu S. Atal is a Life Fellow of IEEE and an Affiliate Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA. He retired in March 2002 after working for more than forty years at Lucent Bell Labs, and AT&T Labs. He was a Technical Director at the AT&T Shannon Laboratory, Florham Park, New Jersey, from 1997 to 2002 and the Head of the Acoustics and Audio Communication Research Department at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, in 1996. He was made a Bell Laboratories Fellow in 1994 and an AT&T Fellow in 1997.

Atal received the B.Sc. (Honors) degree in Physics from the University of Lucknow (India) in 1952, the Diploma in Electrical Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (India) in 1955, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, New York, in 1968.

His research work centered in the fields of acoustics and speech processing covering a wide range of topics, such as computer simulation of concert halls, fading in mobile radio, automatic speaker recognition, and low bit rate speech coding. He is internationally recognized for his many contributions to speech analysis, synthesis, and coding. His pioneering work in linear predictive coding of speech established linear prediction as one of the most important speech analysis technique leading to many applications in coding, recognition and synthesis of speech.

He invented multipulse linear predictive coding and code-excited linear prediction (CELP) which have found widespread applications for efficient transmission of speech in telephone networks. The CELP voice coders have been adopted as standards for digital transmission of voice on cellular radio systems in North America, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere in the world to meet the increasing demand for cellular phones. His current research interests include low bit rate speech coding and automatic speech recognition. His research work is documented in more than 100 technical papers, and he holds seventeen U.S. patents and numerous international patents in speech processing.

He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1987, and to the National Academy of Sciences in 1993. In 1982, he became a Fellow of IEEE “for contributions to the theory of linear prediction and its applications to speech processing.” He is also a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America. He received the IEEE Signal Processing Society Award in 1993 and the 1975 IEEE ASSP Society Technical Achievement Award. He is the recipient of the IEEE Centennial Medal in 1984 and the IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Field Award in 1986. He received the Thomas Edison Patent Award from the R&D Council of New Jersey in 1994 and the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame Inventor of the Year Award in 2000. He was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering in 2003.

Atal resides in Mukilteo, Washington. He has two daughters, Alka and Namita, two granddaughters, Jyotica and Sonali, and two grandsons, Ananth and Niguel.

In this interview, Atal discusses his early life in India, education, career at Bell Laboratories, and IEEE experiences, especially as a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He also discusses his research and patents as well as patent litigation cases.

About the Interview

BISHNU S. ATAL: An Interview Conducted by Mary Ann Hellrigel, Center for the History of Electrical Engineering, 10 May 2022

Interview #878 for the Center for the History of Electrical Engineering, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

Copyright Statement

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Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History Program, IEEE History Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA or ieee-history@ieee.org. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Bishnu S. Atal, an oral history conducted in 2022 by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.

Interview

INTERVIEWEE: Bishnu Atal

INTERVIEWER: Mary Ann Hellrigel

DATE: 10 May 2022

PLACE: Virtual - WebEx

Early life and family

Hellrigel:

I am Mary Ann Hellrigel. I am the institutional historian archivist at the IEEE History Center. Today is May 10th, 2022, and I am here with Bishnu Saroop Atal.

Atal:

Perfect.

Hellrigel:

He is an IEEE Life Fellow. He is now in Region 6, Western USA, and a member of the Seattle Section. He also is a well-known member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He has agreed to record his oral history to help IEEE record and preserve its history and to preserve the work and the meritorious achievements of its members. Thank you, sir. We will get started. Bishnu Atal was born in 1933, and we will move on from there. If you could tell us a bit, sir, about where you were born?

Atal:

I come from India, and I was born in a town which is close to the town where I grew up. The name of the town I was born in is Kanpur. My mother’s family used to live there. I was born in Kanpur, but I moved on to Lucknow, which is the town I grew up in before moving on further in my career.

Hellrigel:

This town is in Northern India.

Atal:

Yes. Let me tell you a little bit more about how our family came to Lucknow. My grandparents and their parents migrated from Western India, about 300 kilometers from Lucknow. The reason for their movement from the western part of the country was that that part of the country was very dry with almost no rain. Life was very difficult. You could not grow anything, so they moved to Lucknow.

Let me tell you a little bit about Lucknow. Lucknow is a very unusual town. Of course, I grew up there, so I liked it. That town almost sprang up into existence during the Mughal Empire. These people governed India from about the sixteenth century for 200 years or so before East India Company moved in there. Then it was always full of activity. Full of activity, you might say, because a lot of people who were interested in art, music, good food, and culture said, well, we do not want to be in Delhi. Let us move on to some place which is better. They established a home in what we call Lucknow now and that became a small kingdom governed by one of what used to be called Nawabs. Nawabs are small kings (mini kings).

When I came to Lucknow and started living there, I really liked it. There was good food, a lot of art, and a lot of people following Islam there. Islam, as you know, has two sects, Sunni and Shia. It was a Shia town. We made a lot of friends from different backgrounds and different tastes and different interests. It was a wonderful city to live in.

Of course, I was living there, so I had to like it, but I really liked Lucknow as a very, very unusual place and a beautiful city to live in and grow up. I studied there at the university, which is called University of Lucknow. I went to school, college and did undergraduate work at Lucknow University. It was all completely in Lucknow where I grew up.

Hellrigel:

Do you get to visit Lucknow?

Atal:

After I moved here [the United States], I did go to Lucknow on the average, about once every three years. If you take my stay here, whatever it is, sixty years, I have visited Lucknow many, many times and I really like it. Of course, Lucknow is not the same Lucknow where I grew up.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Atal:

It has changed. When I was growing up, it was a town of about 300,000 people. Now, I do not know exactly, but it might be ten times bigger and very crowded and very busy. I would like to tell you how life was when I was growing up. Lucknow was a very quiet place. My family had no transportation. I used to walk everywhere in Lucknow. Lucknow was not a very big town. Very convenient. I could walk everywhere. I'd need and ultimately, I got a bicycle, so I started going on bicycle. But most of the time I went on foot in Lucknow everywhere. It was such a pleasant town to walk through and everything. A small place. But ultimately buses started running.

Hellrigel:

When you grew up, did they have what had become known as modern amenities like electricity and streetlights and things like that?

Atal:

Yes. You asked a good question. Early in my life, I lived in a—not the same house where I grew up for a long time. But there they had no electricity. Then my father built a house in 1936, and that you might say three years after I was born. That house was big. I have a picture of the house, if at some state you want to add a picture of that house.

Hellrigel:

Yes. I would.

Atal:

That house was a big house, and I grew up there after staying for three years in that small house. In the big house we had electricity and we had water. I say water because a lot of houses did not have water. We had water.

Hellrigel:

Right. Indoor plumbing?

Atal:

It was a modern house in 1936, not by present standards, but it was as modern as it could be. As a side comment, we used to have cows in the house, because we wanted to have good milk, which in those days, was not as easy as is now. Although we had a cow, the cow gave a small amount of milk, but we had to have a supply of milk, so I used to go to the dairy farms.

Hellrigel:

Dairy farms, yes.

Atal:

There they had a lot of cows. I had to go in the morning early in summer and winter, sit there while the farm owner milked the cow, and he gave me the milk. There was a little cheating going on in those days. They would add water to the milk.

Hellrigel:

Oh, that went on sometimes in the USA, too. Sometimes, farmers used to also put a little bit of a whitening agent in it.

Atal:

Well, we do not know what he did. but water is a common thing I could think of. I used to watch him from the side because he had a lot of cows, and one has to make sure that he does not do anything silly there. In those days, we did not have a car, but only a bicycle. One in the whole family, and so walking was the chief mode. You have to shop for groceries, there were no supermarkets.

Hellrigel:

Sure, you go shop to shop, such as the butcher shop and then the vegetable shop.

Atal:

Yes. It was good because the people who sold vegetables were selling good vegetables, fresh vegetables. You could buy everything. It was my job to get everything, the food, etc., and bring it home. I am just telling you these things because life is so streamlined now, even in India and here [in the United States]. In those days, my father had a business to run.

Hellrigel:

What kind of business did your father have at that time?

Atal:

My father had a business running a retail shop in clothes. The shop sold not ready-made clothes, but fabrics and other similar things, rugs, sheets, and all this. He was alone, running the shop. Hence, he was busy, so I had to do all the housework. Later, my father also bought another business, which in Hindi we call “kirana business.” You may call it a grocery store where spices, wheat, sugar, and fat, and all these things were sold. He was running two shops.

I will go a little bit ahead. It was a busy life for me. On the one hand, I have to study for whatever course I was taking. But also, I had to help my father run these things. I will go, whenever time permitted to open his shop and clean it up a little bit so he can come and take over. I used to come back from the university about 3 or 4 p.m. and go there and sit there to relieve my father so he can go to the other shop. I took care of the shop during the evening. You may ask, where did I do the homework and the studies?

Hellrigel:

In the shop?

Atal:

No, because people came into the shop. They paid the cash, and I was taking their money. People came in and asked questions about whether you have this in the shop or not. I did the homework and studied at home. How did I study? I used to get up at 4 a.m. in the morning and study until about 9 a.m. Since there were no interruptions, there was no disturbance, I had five hours of study learning whatever I needed to do to learn.

Hellrigel:

Wow. This is during college or high school also?

Atal:

Not in early high school, I think, I was too young.

Hellrigel:

Sure, later as you got a little older.

Atal:

I think by the time I was about fourteen or so, I started doing all this routine thing. It became my routine to find time to study. I could not demand that because there were a lot of things to do. I am saying all this, compared to the lifestyle now. Everybody is busy with iPhones, so there's no time left to do anything else. But we spend time in taking care of the family.

Hellrigel:

Back tracking a little bit, what was your mother’s name?

Atal:

My mother's name was Lakshmi. This complicated name stands for the name of the goddess of money.

Hellrigel:

Oh, I see.

Atal:

We have a lot of goddesses like Lakshmi, and that is why a lot of women got the name.

Hellrigel:

Some of my mom's friends had this name.

Atal:

Oh yes, that is right. Lakshmi was a very popular name, and my mother's name was there. I will backtrack a little more for a little more background. My grandfather from my father’s side came, as I said, from 300 kilometer west from Lucknow, from a place which was very dry with desert-like surroundings. My grandfather from my mother's side also came from the same region perhaps less dry, but they were all in jobs working for the kingdoms, kings and other people there.

Hellrigel:

Well, so they had, like administrative jobs that brought them to Lucknow?

Atal:

Ah, that is a good name. My grandfather from my father's side did the business, always business, and very good business. He was 100 percent business. Whereas from the mother's side he was a principal of a school in a town called Ajmer in Western India. That is a famous place in India. My grandfather had a principal's job all his life. He taught and that was his life, taking care of the school. These two upbringings and lifestyles are very different, and I got both. Business, as well as education, administration, and very learned people there. I benefitted from both.

Hellrigel:

Now, your mother, how many children did she have?

Atal:

Well, in India, we used to produce lot of children in those days.

Hellrigel:

[Laughter]

Atal:

This was the common thing because a lot of children did not live. Four daughters survived.

Hellrigel:

You have three sisters?

Atal:

I am sorry, not daughters. I have been mistaken. I have four sisters and I have three brothers.

Hellrigel:

Wow, seven siblings.

Atal:

We had a large family. My father also had two sisters who used to live in the same house, so we had a full house.

Hellrigel:

Now, these sisters, were they widows or were they single?

Atal:

They were, in my early days, not married, and my father then got them married and they then went to their homes. My sisters were younger. They also got married one by one. The last one was married in 1961.

Hellrigel:

That is okay.

Atal:

Up to the 1960s, in India, parents married their daughters around seventeen, eighteen, twenty [years of age].

Hellrigel:

Then the practice is the daughter leaves her house and goes to live with the husband's family?

Atal:

That is right and that is universal. There is a ceremony. A marriage ceremony involves saying goodbye to the daughter, but the son stays at home.

Hellrigel:

The son stays at home.

Atal:

He gets married with his new wife.

Hellrigel:

Eventually, your mother then raised seven children in total?

Atal:

And more because some of them did not live, which I did not mention here.

Hellrigel:

Right. Yes, and that is a tragedy for everybody, but I know for mothers in particular. That is a large family. You have a total of seven surviving siblings, and then sometimes, she had your father's sisters living with you, too. That is a lot of supervising to do.

Your father’s name?

Atal:

My father's name is a long one, Jagannath Prasad. Prasad is like Saroop for me. Jagan is the short first name, so his father would have called him Jagan. Okay. Jagannath. He had a middle name called Prasad, and the last name, of course, was Atal. His full name was “Jagannath Prasad Atal”.

Hellrigel:

I worked with a gentleman at Stevens Institute of Technology named Prasad.

Atal:

That is Prasad. It is a common name.

Hellrigel:

Your father then, his father was in business, so he got the business.

Atal:

All the way. Because when my grandparents and his father came from Western India, and they were doing some business there —I do not know what business they were doing. I cannot remember the exact year, but they migrated somewhere in the nineteenth century. Then they went to the king of that region whose capital was Lucknow, and told them we are coming from Western India, and we want to establish ourselves here. Lucknow, of course, was not a modern town by any means, so there was a lot of land and everything available. The region was known as Oudh and its ruler (mini king) was known as Nawab. The Nawab of Oudh gave him a small piece of land to start his life. He built a very, very good business and he became a very successful businessman. He also worked selling and buying real estate. He was a very prosperous person.

Hellrigel:

Did you get to know him?

Atal:

He died in 1937. I have seen him, but I do not remember talking to him.

Hellrigel:

Oh, you were too young.

Atal:

From my mother's side I remember my grandfather. He also died in 1937, but I remember talking to him because he used to live in my house whereas the other grandfather used to live in his own house.

Hellrigel:

Where are you in the birth order? Are you the eldest?

Atal:

No. I have one elder brother and one younger brother. My elder brother stayed in India because I moved here [the United States of America], and he managed the family business to help my father. My father had a fabric shop, clothes shop, selling things. My elder brother helped my father take care of that business.

Hellrigel:

Then your sisters are younger than you?

Atal:

One sister was older than me. She got married, I do not know exactly the date, but roughly, let us say about 1942 or so. Others got married after about two or three years. Ultimately, the last one got married in 1961, after I moved here to the United States.

Hellrigel:

When you were growing up, what did your parents expect of you? You could have become a school principal or a businessman?

Atal:

Good question. Of course, my father was short of hands in running the business, so he would have liked me to stay and take care of the business and help my elder brother, but I had no such interest.

I tell you my interest, in those days, I am going back now to somewhere about late 1940s timeframe. I was thirteen years old entering high school and I had no interest in running any business, although I worked in the shop and helped my father. I understood the business and my father trained me to be a good accountant, to take care of all the ledgers and all that, but I had absolutely no interest in that. I had an interest in science, of course, and learning new things.

My grandfather from the mother's side I do not think I told you, no, I did tell you, that he was a principal.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Atal:

His name was Ganeshi Lal. Lal is the middle name. He was the principal, so he had a lot of books. When he died in 1937, I got his books. He had a Bible, he had a Koran, and all sort of books, poetry books. I loved reading those books. One more interest developed around that time as we were entering World War II. We had a small radio in the house. On the radio I used to hear broadcasts from Germany and England. I developed an interest in following the news about what Hitler was doing and what England was doing, and I got very interested in the world outside India.

Hellrigel:

One question, sir. At this point in your schooling is the language at school Hindi or English?

Atal:

Excellent question. In the early years, of course, the language was Hindi. Early means the primary level, you might say, and after you enter high school, it changed to English, because science comes in. There was no scientific instruction in Hindi. I had a mix-it-up thing going on from early Hindi to English. When I got into college, it was all English.

Radio

Hellrigel:

You can understand then the British, the BBC and then the radio America or whatever it was?

Atal:

Yes, I will tell you in a minute, yes, yes. It was very different, and things were changing very fast. My wife, who was five years younger, had her education completely in Hindi because after independence the government changed the rules and Hindi was introduced in a big way, except for scientific subjects. They said if you are not studying science, you do not need English, you need Hindi. So, that is a little side comment. I had a good education with English medium.

Hellrigel:

The BBC was spanning the globe.

Atal:

Yes. I used to hear Prime Minister [Winston] Churchill, I heard King George V, his speeches, and news.

Hellrigel:

Well, what did that seem like? You're a young boy and India is a British colony, so you know who Winston Churchill is.

Atal:

Well, I had interest. I tuned the radio to BBC and heard what Churchill was saying.

Hellrigel:

Oh, you played it around with the tuner to receive different radio programs.

Atal:

Later, I started listening to the Voice of America. That was when I was about fourteen years old and in the high school. When I started listening to the Voice of America Harry Truman was president of the United States. I did not know about [President Franklin] Roosevelt at all because I did not listen to him on the radio and hear his speeches.

Hellrigel:

Yes, President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in 1945.

Atal:

Truman, I heard President Truman on Voice of America and learned about him. I had a good knowledge about what President Truman was doing after World War II and how he was creating a new world. Soon, I learned the Cold War was developing and I followed all this very carefully. That was my introduction to America. America was, in my mind, far away, who knows where. England appeared close, not because it was physically, but due to listening to BBC. Then I went to the next topic. All this activity of connecting and listening to all these broadcasts developed an interest in my mind about foreign countries. I wanted to know more about them. I could listen to BBC, okay, and I could listen to Voice of America too but limited. But I wanted to learn more, so I went to another avenue, pen friends.

Hellrigel:

Oh, pen pals. You write letters?

Atal:

Pen pals. You call it pen pals and we called it pen friends in those days. Pen friends, slowly, slowly, they came into my life. Here I am listening to Prime Minister Churchill or King George and getting BBC and all this. Oh, I said no, let me have a pen friend in England. That is the first thing I started. I got a pen friend in England and that brought a little English life into my family because they sent pictures.

When they sent pictures of their parents sitting on the beach, my family said, what are they doing? We do not do this in India; sitting on the beach with the swimming outfits.

Hellrigel:

[Laughter] No.

Atal:

It was good. Foreign culture started coming in. Now, of course, everything is very transparent all over the world, but in those days, it was a big thing that I was bringing foreign culture. I got into the Italy [culture] when I got a pen friend in Rome, Italy. I got pen friends in Helsinki, Finland, and Prague, Czechoslovakia, etc. Then I wrote to the Indian ambassador in Moscow, in the Soviet Union, that I wanted a pen friend in Russia. Well, the ambassador wrote to me, that Russia did not allow that. I still have that letter from the Indian ambassador, saying, that is not allowed. Ultimately, I had several pen friends, and that is how I expanded my outward connection from India. Many of these friendships I continued for fifteen years or so, even after I moved out here [to the United States]. I really enjoyed that.

Hellrigel:

When you are getting pen friends was it acceptable in your parents' mind, or were they afraid you were going to get too flighty or disillusioned, worrying about other parts of the world?

Atal:

Good question. I do not think my parents worried about these things. They worried only when I said I will leave India, but that was much later. They worried because then they will lose me. They were all for this [learning about other cultures].

Although I helped my father in business, I had an empire of my own with all the foreign contacts and connections. I really liked that contact with foreigners, learning about them. I wanted to expand, just not on the house, on the family or India, I wanted to expand my world to be outside, so pen friends. Now I took one extra step. The pen friends were good, but you write a letter to a friend, and the letter—the post—the communication infrastructure in those days was so poor. The other thing was the radio. Radio is a one-way broadcast medium and letter writing is two-way, but it takes about three to four weeks to turn around communication there. I used to do that, but I found it too slow. I had to wait, write a letter, the letter would be delivered. My pen friend read my letter, then he responds back, then I will read his letter. This whole thing may take several weeks.

Although I had a lot of pen friends, I found this was a slow communication medium. I had a big interest in connecting to the outside world, so I said, what else? I heard the name ham radio, amateur radio. Ham radio, I learned about it. I learned in fact quite a bit about it. And, I said, ah ha, that is an avenue where I can contact, and this is wireless. Not the wireless of today which you use your phone. But the wireless of those days which allowed two-way communication.

Hellrigel:

And quick communication.

Atal:

That was a big thing. Immediately, I took my family radio, I was just coming out of college, and I re-wired that radio. I changed all its circuitry so that it became more sensitive and more capable. I learned enough about radio and all this so I could improve on the reception of radio. I set up a big antenna and I used to keep a logbook of ham radio. I do not know if you can see it?

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes, I see your codebook.

Atal:

This is my logbook from May to September 1951. In this book, I have every contact I had with a ham radio person. Here I entered the date and what I talked to him about.

Hellrigel:

Are you still active? Do you keep your certification?

Atal:

Life has changed completely. I will go with that later, but I wanted to give you a line about it. This line I wrote in this book is from 1949. The antenna used is a 142 feet long wire. I mounted it on the fourth story of my house, high up, 142 feet long. It was a lot of work for me to do all this. And I could rotate the antenna.

Hellrigel:

Oh, move it to catch the signal.

Atal:

I used to rotate it often towards Australia when I used to talk to people in Australia. Then I moved it towards South America when I wanted to talk to people there. Because it was such a long antenna, I could direct it to pick up from a particular direction.

Hellrigel:

While you are doing this no one in your house could listen to the local music, news, and programs because you controlled the antenna and radio.

Atal:

That created a problem. My sister got mad, so I used to do all this after evening.

Hellrigel:

In the night-time.

Atal:

Yes, at night. I worked in the shop in the evening, from about 4:00 pm to about 10:00 pm. In the morning I got up at 4 am to study, and I had about one hour or so in the night to listen to ham radio. Ham radio is an international thing. They do not speak English. But they used to like— CQ, CQ, CQ, “come quickly”.

Hellrigel:

Code.

Atal:

That is the word they use if you go on the ham radio, they say, CQ, CQ, CQ. I also got a kind of license. I will show you the picture of that if I can find it somewhere.

Hellrigel:

It is interesting that to you these mean so much that you kept it. It was the foundation of your life.

Atal:

Yes, that was my life in a big way. Connecting to the outside world was three-quarters of my mind. I was so interested in foreign countries, in foreign people, what they did, what they were, what was happening. I do not know if you can see that.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes. Yes, I can.

Atal:

Well, this is the first thing here (showing license).

Hellrigel:

A little higher.

Atal:

This is ISWLVU25104.

Hellrigel:

Your license and your call numbers.

Atal:

My license, yes. The “International Short Wave League [ISWL]”.

Hellrigel:

Wow. You're doing this, and how about your brothers? Were they involved?

Atal:

I will tell you in a minute. This is from Kuwait, and this is from Australia.

Hellrigel:

Fantastic.

Atal:

I have a whole pile of things. I just picked up four because they fit in the page. My elder brother was two-and-a-half years older than me, and my younger brother was five years younger than me, and that explains a lot of the difference. My elder brother was very busy taking care of the business. Hence, he had no time for anything else, but he had his own, what I call socializing. He had a lot of friends. Now I had only a few friends in India, but I had a lot of friends abroad. I did not spend much time talking to friends in India. I thought I was wasting time talking to friends. I do not have too many friends. I talk business and science and I can give lectures, but I do not enjoy necessarily talking.

Hellrigel:

Small talk, yes.

Atal:

I do small talk, but I do not care much about it. I think these interests are created in your mind due to some particular combination of factors which play a role in your development. It could be that when my grandfather (from my mother’s side) died in 1937, I went to his room and found a lot of books. I just took all the books to my room. I learnt a lot from these books.

Womens education in India

Hellrigel:

One question. Your sisters, how about their education?

Atal:

Very good question. In India, the women were given one role in old days. Old means let us go back far away.

Hellrigel:

Pre-1960s and all that.

Atal:

Even here [in the USA] you might think their job is to produce children.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes. For the longest time, it was that the boy goes to college. Do not waste the money [on the girl]. I even had professors in graduate school who were early to mid-career—if they were alive, they would be 100 years old or older, and they were in early to mid-career, they said that when you had fellowships give it to the guy. They thought, if you give it to the woman, she is just going to get married and that would end her career, so the fellowship would be wasted. In the end, they said they would give it to the man. This was when the law was different, too.

Atal:

Right. Right. Education, my sisters now, my younger sisters still tell me, they miss it because what's happening nowadays is people are learning a lot of things. They read books. And they find a gap because in their childhood they were not prepared to learn things. I cannot discuss science with my sisters. They say—they say I do not understand science. I said also I did not understand once upon a time when I was very young, but I learned. But they say, I do not know how to learn science now. I do not know how to answer these things. But for me learning science cultivates a state of mind to really start learning new things.

After my retirement from Bell Labs, I came to Seattle and joined the University of Washington as an affiliate professor to work with Professor Les Atlas at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and his students. I like to work with the students. One thing he asked very early, you have worked in acoustics.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Atal:

Acoustics. Tell me one thing. You go to an orchestra. There are a number of musicians and a number of instruments. They all are singing or playing instruments. That produces vibrations of molecules in the air. But when I hear that music, I do not worry about vibrations. I hear instruments. Why do we hear that? I asked the same question to one of the famous professors at MIT. He said we are trained.

In India, we do not have orchestra. We have musical instruments like sitar, tabla, and drums. In 1962, I went to Carnegie Hall in New York City to attend an orchestra. I heard new sounds and had no problem listening to them and enjoying them. I was not trained to hear Western instruments in an orchestra. And I could hear a violin separately from a drum.

I had retired but again went to work. I started consulting papers. Many papers were about learning. They can teach a computer to do that. These days we use artificial intelligence which allows us to do all the separations, but not in 2002. I was thinking I had heard the word superposition. Superposition was an old word coming from the course I took in 1952 in quantum physics at Lucknow University. In nature, everything like atoms, molecules, neutrons, protons, etc. are like little balls running around, they are waves.

Hellrigel:

Oh, the motion.

Atal:

I said, ah, to understand superposition I have to learn about waves and something new “quantum physics.” I did take a course on this topic in 1952, but that was passing a test and getting through an exam. I found a twelve-hour video course on quantum physics taught by Professor Benjamin Schumacher, Professor of Physics at Kenyon College, an excellent professor and very articulate. I sat in my living room on the sofa and listened to the videos over and over again until I began to understand little by little. Then I bought books. I have a whole collection of books now on quantum physics. A great book is The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn by Louisa Gilder, [2008]. Another great book is What is Life: The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell by Erwin Schrödinger, [1944]. I started reading papers on quantum physics. There were questions and questions and questions. It was like a Bell Labs culture again, without Bell Labs. I have begun to understand some of the science that governs the subatomic realm and behaves unlike anything we experience in our everyday lives. What I have learnt is that we must let go our preconceptions about the world and instead let mathematics lead the way. I started to understand that everything is statistical in nature. The idea of “entanglement” is perhaps the hardest to understand. Erwin Schrödinger first introduced the concept of entanglement in the 1930s. The experiments of Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger with entangled photons showed that entanglement results from a genuine connection in which manipulating one quantum object affects another, regardless of their distance of separation. Entanglement has been called the most important feature of quantum physics and could profoundly change the way we could move information from one place to another.

Hellrigel:

Now some people retire and take up a sport, such as golf, or a hobby. You decided that in your late sixties you're going to continue learning and jump into a new field?

Atal:

During retirement, I promised my wife that we would forget about science and all that. In fact, from about 2001 to 2008, we traveled. I took a number of cruises and went on trips and visited friends. I did all that, but my mind started getting into science again and my wife got really mad. She said you spent all your life like this and you're back to the same condition again.

Hellrigel:

You continued studying science and you moved to Washington because that is where your daughter lives.

Atal:

Exactly right. I believe you must be near your children in retirement. My younger daughter lives in St. Louis, Missouri because her husband works there. He's a medical doctor. My other daughter is a medical doctor here, in Everett, Washington. I bought a house near Puget Sound.

Hellrigel:

Wow, that was a big decision and step to take.

Atal:

This was a new experience. This house and where I am sitting in my office now, the Olympic Mountains are right in front of me. Nature is in abundance here, and it is a beautiful place to live. I never lived like this in New Jersey. New Jersey was roads and houses.

Hellrigel:

Well, you were living in central New Jersey. You'd have to either move to Sussex County or a mansion on the ocean.

Atal:

Yes. New Jersey has a lot of people and some very large cities and many suburbs, too.

Hellrigel:

We're the most densely populated state, New Jersey. We have more people per square mile that any other state.

Atal:

I lived in New Jersey because Bell Labs was located there in Murray Hill in Central New Jersey.

Lucknow University

Hellrigel:

I am going to backtrack a little bit. When we look back you went to the University of Lucknow to get your B.S. in physics. How did you select that university?

Atal:

There was a university in Lucknow. To think of my father paying me to go to another university, my father would not have spent money on this. He said go to Lucknow University. Lucknow was a reasonable university, not the greatest place in the world to study. I enrolled there to study for a degree in physics. Why physics? When India became independent in 1947, it was an agriculture country. Industrial things? Zero. Everything was imported.

Hellrigel:

That is the legacy of colonialism.

Atal:

British rule.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Atal:

That is how life was in 1947. I went to the university in 1949 and studied there for three years. I did not even ask myself, what will I do, or what will I not do? Well, in Lucknow University the students took different disciplines. I took physics. I do not know why. What is next? I had no answer. What will I do in my life? I will study in university, then apply for a job at the university, and then become a teacher. My father said, you will not get any job studying physics. He was saying, become an engineer. Civil engineers make buildings. Mechanical engineers make mechanical products like cars. There are jobs and jobs and jobs.

Hellrigel:

Yes, jobs and power plants.

Atal:

Yes. I had no interest in civil or mechanical. Here I am approaching twenty and the whole future is completely blank. I had no idea what I will do, but I had another empire which I had built, namely ham radio, communication, and pen friends. Communication became the biggest buzzword into my life. I found that wireless communication is the most important thing. Now, of course wireless is important, but in those days, wireless was a stepchild of everybody, even AT&T. Today, what a change, wireless is here. We will talk about this later.

In 1952, what to do? I said, I will study electronic communications. I did not call it electronic because that word was not popular, so electrical communication. Then I consulted and found a place in Bangalore, which is in south India, 1200 miles south of Lucknow. I found an Institute, a very unusual Institute. It is not a university. It was called the Indian Institute of Science. It was set up by a famous Indian industrialist, J. R. D. Tata. How did J. R. D. Tata get into this? He was an industrialist. He was in business, but he traveled by ship to Tokyo, and he met a person called Swami Vivekanand, a very important person in those days. He was an Indian philosopher. He told Tata that you are doing a lot of business, but why don’t you do something for education?

Tata came back to India, and he set up the Institute in Bangalore. Bangalore is an extremely wonderful place. I applied to that Institute; they had a department of electrical communication engineering. Now, that institute was a research institute mostly, but they had a few teaching departments, such as electrical communication engineering, power engineering, metallurgy, aeronautics, etc. It was a very small place with only 400 students. I applied and got admission, but I still had no idea what I would do. I thought I wanted to study electrical communication because that was my interest. I went into that interest direction rather than the job direction. My father was extremely mad at me.

Hellrigel:

Did he give you a lecture? Did he say not to ask him for money to go in that different direction?

Atal:

Well, I will tell you why. This was an emotional problem for my parents because I was going to leave Lucknow not for a town, but for a city which is 1200 miles south of Lucknow. It took three days by train to get there. Then my father wanted me to work in the shop, but if not, to take a job in civil engineering to stay near the house to help the family and help my brothers. I was determined to go to Bangalore.

Another good thing is that the education in India in those days was very inexpensive, not like American universities. The tuition fees I paid to the Indian Institute of Science, was [less expensive than American universities]. How do I convert it now? Well, let me take the same exchange rate, which was prevalent then, five rupees to the U.S. dollar. That will be like $12 per month. The living expenses would be like $100 per month. My father gave me that money and I traveled to Bangalore. It opened my eyes. Lucknow was a provincial town, and I learned enough about north India and surroundings. Bangalore was different. It is in south India, and it was a town of close to one million people, wonderful town, wonderfully laid, very picturesque town. I met people from all over India. I met people from different regions of India. It kind of opened my whole mind to a new awareness that India is big country with different people, different languages, and different culture, and they were all coming from different places to study there.

Hellrigel:

I have one question. I used to teach geography, so I read that when India was created there was the big divide between the Muslim north and the Hindu south. Did you have any reservations about going to the other place?

Atal:

No. You see what happened is that India had a large Muslim population before independence. You know past history. Muslims have been coming to India.

Hellrigel:

Since about 600 C.E.

Atal:

They settled in India, and for them, India was their homeland. Some people say that England, kind of put the wrong idea into their heads that Hindus will not treat you well, and Muslims got suspicious. In 1947, they wanted India to be divided into two pieces. That division was very painful because a very large migration took place between India and Pakistan. And not only that, a very large number of people, both Hindus and Muslims were killed.

Hellrigel:

Oh, extremely large.

Atal:

Yes, an extremely large number. The whole start of India was in a very hateful division which I lived through. The amount of killing was absolutely horrible. So anyhow, India became independent.

Hellrigel:

But for your father, even though he had reservations, he supported you. He gave you the funding and he said go to university.

Atal:

Well, he had no choice. I said, no, I am not going to stay in Lucknow. I am going to go. He was absolutely sad, very sad.

Hellrigel:

I guess another father could have said, well, go, but go on your own with no support.

Atal:

That my father will not do. He would not have done that, but he was very disappointed. This part of my life.

Hellrigel:

How about your mother? How did she react?

Atal:

My mother was also disappointed. My parents were expecting that their sons would stay home and take care of the family business. I was going to Bangalore for further studies. The future of my younger brother was unsettled. My younger brother then studied mining engineering. He studied mining engineering in Eastern India and took a job not to his liking, but the job situation in India then was horrible.

When I came here to this country in 1961, the first thing I did as a matter of urgency was to tell my younger brother, “You take admission to a university here and I will pay your expenses,” which consumed half of my salary at Bell Labs. He came and he studied at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, so, then my father was really mad. He said, not only you went away, but you also took your younger brother away also. There is no easy answer to these things. My father was trying to run his life the way he saw it and world was changing. He did not see that change. Hence, he did not appreciate that his sons will not be living in the world he lived in.

Hellrigel:

It is different in terms of not only what you'll do for an income, but his sons will not be living in close proximity to him. This is alien.

Atal:

This is a very important point, in some sense, I kind of destroyed the life of my father.

Hellrigel:

Well, but if your brother would have stayed, maybe the economic opportunity was shrinking anyway.

Atal:

My father did not see that way. He wanted us all to stay here. That is all. How your life will become what, he was not interested. This is a change. My feeling is that all of us go through this from a young age to an older age. Even now, I do not think people prepare for old age here. This challenge remains. The government provides a lot of help here. That is all. But I do not think our society has found any solution that a person can live happily from day one to until he dies.

Hellrigel:

Yes, America is not known for being a happy country.

Atal:

I thought about these things when I was young and middle age and what will I do at old age, but to give you another conclusion, which I might have given later is, I tell everybody who I meet, I get a chance “beyond eighty is the best age in my life.”

Hellrigel:

Oh. How come?

Atal:

I was talking to the dean at the University of Southern California about two years ago, and we were discussing a lot of things. He said, “What do you do?” I said, “I am in the best time in my life, 80-plus.” He said, “what do you mean? I am already worried about retirement, and I do not know what I will do?” While I was working at Bell Labs, I enjoyed it, but it was a busy life. After retirement, I have the greatest opportunity and freedom to learn new things. A whole set of new questions kept me busy and happy with further opportunities to learn.

I got interested in another topic called yoga. Now yoga entered my life back in 1957. In those days, yoga was different than yoga you see today. Yoga was kind of unknown almost. Although, I was born in India, we did not know anything about it. In 1956, I found a bookstore in Delhi, India and found four very old books on yoga. They were published in 1932 and had a lot of information on Yoga exercises and their benefits. I read and I learned about six or seven yoga asanas, which I started doing. Since 1957, I kept this practice of doing yoga every day all my life. After I retired, I said, well, these days, we can learn by reading books on yoga and also, I can watch TV programs on yoga and I got YouTube. Now I am very selective, and I do yoga for different needs.

Hellrigel:

You practice different types of yoga for different needs.

Atal:

I started to do yoga when I was about twenty-four years old. Then at eighty years old, I found I had enough information to select what I should do and what I should not do. Today, I spend one hour every day on yoga.

Hellrigel:

Did you get your family to do yoga, too?

Atal:

Well, my wife used to do that. My wife passed away in 2010, but she used to do yoga her way.

Hellrigel:

On Thursdays we have a yoga seminar via Zoom for IEEE employees.

Atal:

Oh, you see, this is unbelievable how much yoga you can learn. Now, yoga is a complicated area. I am not knowledgeable enough. I learned enough for me to carry on. What I want is that at this age I want my body to be flexible so I can move around. My house has three floors, and each floor has thirteen steps in between them. The top floor where I am talking now is where my bedroom is, and my office is here. The middle floor is where I cook and the living room and dining area. The bottom floor is services. Plus, I have a huge library of books. All this leads to a lot of running around!

IEEE

Hellrigel:

One of the initiatives of 2022 IEEE President K.J. Ray Liu is that IEEE should be your center of lifelong learning.

Atal:

Let me comment on IEEE. IEEE has been my home for a large part of my life, and it provided an organization where I really felt so comfortable. I attend its meetings. I attend all sorts of IEEE activities and it played a very helpful role throughout my life throughout. And I cannot express how I will be without IEEE.

Hellrigel:

Why did you join IEEE? You did not join as a student, but then you came to Bell. You joined IEEE once you decided it was useful?

Atal:

I came to Bell Labs. There were a lot of IEEE members there, and although I attended IEEE meetings, I was ignoring IEEE. In fact, the first paper I ever gave on my research was at an IEEE meeting in 1967! I attended IEEE meetings and paid some fees for registration. One of my friends said, “I want to nominate you as an IEEE Fellow.” I did not know what that meant. He said, “I am going to nominate you,” but then he found out I was not an IEEE member. I attended meetings, but I was not part of IEEE membership. He said, “become an IEEE member right away.” I became a member of IEEE quickly and within two years I became a Fellow.

Hellrigel:

What's this person's name?

Atal:

Dr. Lawrence Rabiner. He has an IEEE oral history entry. We have been together since 1965 when he finished his Ph.D. at MIT and we have been working together since then. We used to attend IEEE committee meetings. At committee meetings I did everything, but I did not become a member.

Hellrigel:

How come you were reluctant to be a member?

Atal:

It just skipped my attention.

Hellrigel:

It is funny that your buddies already thought you were an IEEE member.

Atal:

You can assume that. That is why nobody was sent to talk to me. I also did not know that because I did not know. I was a full-fledged activist in IEEE, attending meetings and committee meetings. I was everywhere in IEEE.

Hellrigel:

Did you go to your IEEE Section’s meetings? Was that the Central Jersey Section?

Atal:

IEEE meetings are everywhere. There are so many IEEE meetings that I attended. You select whatever was of interest. IEEE was my home. Early in the game when I joined, I think I started with IEEE workshops. I actually headed a workshop in the United States. The workshops are very good; focused on one particular topic every year. IEEE has many angles. Tell me how many members IEEE has.

Hellrigel:

IEEE has about 400,000 members. It has about 420,000 members in 2022.

Atal:

Half a million, let us say.

Hellrigel:

Membership numbers go up and down. They fluctuate especially when members who have not renewed are deactivated at the end of February each year. There are interesting demographic trends, too. If I recall correctly, the number of senior members has been ebbing and flowing as some folks pass away and others may give up their membership. IEEE is gaining a lot of student members in Region 10, especially India. One of their challenges is to get the students to stay and become a full member of IEEE. There are discounts and price incentives to encourage people to make that jump from student member to member. That is one of the challenges because they also want to remind people that it is a lifelong experience and people make lifelong friends.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Some people, primarily academics, want to publish, so what is the incentive for industry people? The academics want to publish and for industry people it is also lifelong learning, so there's a mix. It is a challenge to try to get the younger members, especially students, to stay. Maybe companies do not pay as much for membership anymore as they may have paid in the past. Maybe employers will not pay for conferences as much as they did in the past. Many people are also more focused on their IEEE Societies and particular conferences, so that is another challenge. Why did you become a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society?

Atal:

Yes, I am a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. The IEEE Audio and Electroacoustics Group sponsored the 1967 Conference on Speech Communication and Processing and that went well with my new interest in linear prediction. This group rapidly evolved into the Signal Processing Society. which was a new rapidly emerging IEEE Society in the early 1960s.

We have not talked about so many things except Bell Labs, right? We've covered lot of area today.

Bell Labs

Hellrigel:

Well, we could go back to Bell Labs.

Atal:

Let us.

Before I came to Bell Labs, I was sitting in India with a communications engineering degree, so how did I enter Bell Labs research? Let us go back to where we left off. I started studying in Bangalore in 1952. In 1955, they did not give me a degree or anything, I received a Diploma of the Institute of Science.

Hellrigel:

Yes, I found that interesting.

Atal:

People ask, what is that? I do not know what that is. The Diploma meant that I have completed a three-year course in electrical communication engineering. The first two years of that course included basic engineering material, such as civil and mechanical engineering. I received the diploma in 1955, and what should I do next? Most of my friends applied for a research assistantship or teaching assistantship in America and came to study there. The Indian Institute of Science offered me a position right away, a teaching position. I said, well, that is a good job. That was in 1956.

Life was moving on and I was happy. I was in the acoustics area, teaching whatever I had to teach. I enjoyed doing all those things and that was a good time. By 1958, I found something which was very unpleasant. My friends, classmates who left Indian Institute of Science in 1955 after getting a diploma and taking admission at one of the universities in America, came back with their Ph.Ds. When they came with their Ph.D., they got appointed straight to a job of assistant professor at the Institute. I was an instructor. I asked and found out that I could not qualify further from instructor unless I had a foreign degree. There was a bias in India against, how should I express it? We had a feeling of what I call--

Hellrigel:

Inferiority?

Atal:

Ah, you got the right word, exactly, an inferiority complex in India. That India is not as good as rest of the world or at least America or England or the European countries. In 1958, around about that time, it dawned on me that I was at the end of the road. I had to do something about it. I cannot continue this job, there was no future. Immediately, I thought about it, and I had two ideas. I did not know what to do in some systematic way. I said, well, maybe I should go to America and get a degree. Where? What place? I had no information. Well, I thought about MIT. MIT was well known in India. I said, I will apply for admission to MIT. Then I heard of Bell Labs. There's a place called Bell Telephone Labs, not Bell Labs, but Bell Telephone Labs. I said I will apply for a job there. I selected two avenues to leave India and go to America. Get admission to MIT for getting a Ph.D. or take a job at Bell Telephone Labs. I did not know what it meant to do any one of those things, and whether I could do all that. But I said that is what I will do. I wrote a letter right away to Bell Labs. I do not know whom. There was no Google or anything to find out anything. There's no literature about Bell Telephone Labs in India. I wrote a letter to the Technical Employment Department (Head, Technical Employment Department), Bell Telephone Labs. I knew it was at Murray Hill, New Jersey, a small place, and that letter ended up in Bell Labs there.

Hellrigel:

Wow. You were being a pen pal. You were good at letter writing.

Atal:

Since I expressed interest and that I am an acoustics person, they passed that letter on to their Director of Acoustics and Visual Research. There was a lab like that in Bell Telephone Labs in Murray Hill. They passed it on there, so that was one avenue I got into the system very fast, which is not easy.

I was there. Then I wrote to MIT and applied. They gave me admission, no problem, but they did not give me any assistantship. Well, I did not have money, so I said, now, what am I going to do. I looked at the catalog of MIT and I found there were three professors at MIT in 1940s who started a company that became known as BBN. Its name was Bolt, Beranek and Newman. Bolt is Professor (Dr.) Richard Bolt, Beranek is Professor (Dr.) Leo Beranek, and Newman is Professor (Dr.) Robert Newman. I wrote a letter immediately to Professor Bolt telling him that I have got admission at MIT, but I do not have money to study there. Can I work at your company and study part-time? Well, he was very kind. He immediately talked to the Dean of Engineering at MIT and asked if this was possible. The Dean of Engineering said, no, it is not possible. MIT does not want people to work and study. They want you to stay in the dorm there.

Hellrigel:

Oh, full time.

Atal:

Full time. So, Dr. Bolt wrote to me that it is not possible. But, in those days I think people were very what I call human. Dr. Bolt immediately called his friend at Bell Labs, Dr. E. E. David. David is one of your old members. David was later the scientific advisor to President [Richard M.] Nixon. David got a call from Bolt and who asked him if Bell Labs could hire Mr. Atal. If so, Mr. Atal can study in New York and do both things. Bell Labs got two inputs, one from the Technical Employment Department and one call from Dr. Bolt. Well, they were impressed that one person in India is getting so much attention. I did not know about what was going on here because I was in India. One day I was sitting in my office at the Institute of Science, the office person came in and said, you have a call from Murray Hill, New Jersey. Will you accept the call? I said, okay, I will accept the call. A few days later, I got a letter from Dr. M. R. Schroeder [Manfred Robert Schroeder (1926-2009)], where he described the whole program of research in the acoustics area and in speech area at Bell Labs. Very nice letter, very detailed description. He said we will try to reach me by telephone on a particular day, at a particular time. That day was February 6, 1959. Schroeder started the conversation with the question, whether I had already received his letter. I did receive his letter. Well, telephone communication was not so simple as now. There were no satellites then. Radio communication was poor. While everything was crisp and clear up to New Delhi, communication completely fell apart beyond Pune in India. Look at the communication we are having today.

Hellrigel:

Seamless.

Atal:

Seamless. Sorry to say, after forty-five minutes of the poor telephone conversation, some with the help of telephone operators in New York, London, Pune etc., I finally gave up and said, I enjoyed talking to you. It is only fair to add the telephone company, fully aware of this bad situation, charged Bell Labs. only for three minutes connection time

Hellrigel:

My gosh.

Atal:

I am making you aware how communication was in the 1959 timeframe. You have to struggle. The same thing repeated. When I joined Bell Labs in 1961, I called my mother. You could not pick up a telephone and call. You had to make a reservation, just like Bell Labs made. First make a reservation.

Hellrigel:

Reserve a time and call.

Atal:

Then you try to pick up. You have to really do a whole rigmarole of formalities. And again, poor results! A three-minute call with maybe five seconds of conversation and I got a bill for $20. I got so mad at AT&T. I called their long-distance department and said, why did this happen? They gave me a whole slew of things. They said, the Indian government charges them and this and that, and all sort of rigmarole. That day I promised myself that this situation will change within my lifetime. I will make sure that this does not repeat. People should be able to talk to their parents, to their mother, father, family members, whenever they want, whenever they like at a reasonable cost.

Hellrigel:

They can actually hear them?

Atal:

Now, how could I do this? I will cover this a little later, this little involved story. I promised myself I will do that. But how?

I jumped a few steps here and there.

After my telephone conversation with Dr. Schroeder, I got a cable from him the next day saying that we could not do anything about it, but we are going to talk to our management and get their approval for a job for you. A few weeks later (4 April 1959), I got another cable saying that we have a job offer for you. It was a very good job offer. I was sitting in India where I did not know where my future is. This job provided a salary of $10,000 a year.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Atal:

Those days, $10,000 a year in 1959, was a lot of money. I felt very good. Problem solved, I thought.

Hellrigel:

For you.

Atal:

Not necessarily. I got the job. I felt so happy, but in the meantime, something else was happening. Here, I got the job offer. I thought, well, in six months or nine months, or one year, I will be at Bell Labs. The visa between America or the United States and India was the most difficult visa to acquire because in those days the quota system was in operation. The quota from India to America for visa holders was only hundred and that was mostly filled by relatives of citizens of United States already in America. There was a waiting list. At first, I thought the waiting list was a few months. I was told the waiting list could last as much as a lifetime. Indeed, I waited and waited.

I wrote to Bell Labs, asking what should I do? But something good happened here. Dr. David, who was the lab director for acoustics and visual research, called his boss and that is the Vice President of Research at Bell Labs, Dr. William O. Baker. Baker was a very influential person. He was an advisor to Defense Secretary, Mr. [Robert] McNamara. He picked up the phone and called McNamara. What happened between Baker and McNamara, I will not know exactly. Bell Labs, wrote to me about this episode “Upon learning of my visa problem, we appealed to the Department of Defense at Washington, D.C. to intercede with the Department of State, which is responsible for the issuance of the visa, pointing out that we are urgently in need of additional technical manpower to carry on our military and essential telephone projects, many of which the Department of Defense has asked us to undertake.” That was news to me. I was not going to work on a defense project or anything. No, but that is the magic phrase.

Baker knew how to turn the screws. “We furnished the department with all the details, and I understand that they requested that the Department of State grant you a temporary visa which will enable you to come to United States and then upgrade it to an immigration visa.” That was a major step and Baker was so proud of that. He called me twice on the telephone. He said, “see this is the best thing I did in my entire career at Bell Telephone Labs, I got you a visa.” But for me it was also one of the most important things that I got the visa and came here [to the United States].

Hellrigel:

At this point you are married?

Atal:

Not yet. I was going to say that I was about to at that time. I do not know exactly the timeframe. I got married in July 1959. Yes, in April 1959 when I got the offer from Bell Labs I was not married. Bell Labs gave me first class airfare from Bangalore to New York to join Bell Labs. That was a very good offer; a good salary and single first-class airfare to join. The first-class airfare was very high. It could buy me two tourist class tickets, one for me and one for my wife, so both of us came here. Traveling in those days was also very cumbersome. Our plane went from Delhi to Bombay to Rome to London to New York. At that time, they used to call it Idlewild Airport.

Hellrigel:

Oh yes, the Long Island airport.

Atal:

Bell Labs was very generous in everything. Schroeder wrote to me that I will see you. Nobody does that. Schroeder wrote to me that he will come to the Idlewild Airport to personally receive me, but then he told me that unfortunately, he had to present a paper in Philadelphia at the Acoustical Society that particular day. So, he asked one of his senior colleagues to come to the airport and receive me. Then they put me in a hotel in Summit, New Jersey. Schroeder said in any case, after the next day, he and Dr. David would come.

I had to get settled and that is not easy for a person coming from India. This is a strange new country. I came from India with a small amount of money. In the evening I checked into the hotel and the next day Dr. David was there in the morning at 10 a.m. He said, well, let us look for a place for you to live. We went searching for places to live and we saw here, and we saw there. He used to shop at a fish market in Summit, New Jersey and he mentioned that he was looking for somewhere to find accommodations for this young person. Do you know something? He said, no, no, no. I am building an apartment not far away from here and I can make sure that apartment is ready in a few days or so. My problem was solved. The apartment was also near a train station and near a bus station. I did not have a car, so I could go by bus or train to Bell Laboratories, in Murray Hill, my workplace, and to other different places from Summit, New Jersey. The accommodation problem got settled. Things were coming in shape very fast.

I was very, very happy. Then at four o'clock Schroeder's call came in. He had just come back from Philadelphia, and he had a big party for me at his house. There were about forty people in his house, all ready to talk to me and my wife. We were completely what I call, overtaken by so much of a change. We could not understand how things were happening so fast. I met so many people and it was a good introduction to a new country I did not know anything about, but where I wanted to live. At that time, I knew I was going to live maybe forever, huh? Or who knows what. We have left India.

Hellrigel:

When you came you had maybe two suitcases and perhaps material being shipped by boat. How do you make the move regarding your personal belongings?

Atal:

No, I brought just two suitcases and nothing more. I did not know what clothes to bring. It was of course May, the springtime, and that was good. If I'd come in winter, I will live in a great difficulty.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes, you would have needed winter clothes right away.

Atal:

Whatever clothes I had I brought there. Then the next step for a person coming from India, and especially a person like me who has never lived in America. A person who for the first time was coming to America with his wife. A person, not alone, but with his wife, has to get settled and it is a monumental task. Indeed, starting work and all this. What did they do? I came here on the 12th of May and a few days later I found three station wagons near my apartment. Three people came in with so many things and they furnished my apartment in one hour to the minutest detail. Sheets, pillows, blankets, everything. Even the brooms.

Hellrigel:

Where these the other housewives of the Bell Labs staff?

Atal:

No, they were three men, Dr. Schroeder, Dr. David, and Dr. Hank McDonald from Bell Labs. They were resourceful and they were thinking of me and my wife and how to make our life comfortable.

Hellrigel:

They set up your apartment?

Atal:

They moved me in, and they went into very great detail to work out all this. My apartment became functional then, but still I had to buy furniture and all this, but I got going. In the meantime, both Mrs. Schroeder and Mrs. David took my wife for a shopping trip. I did not know what to buy, where to buy it, so they took my wife for a shopping trip. We knew about shopping scenarios. We bought all sorts of things. We got going living in America in a very, very smooth way. I do not know, but this was an out of the ordinary experience for me. The Bell Labs people were so cordial. Bell Labs was so accommodative.

Hellrigel:

Did they do this for other people or were you a special case?

Atal:

No. No. I got very special treatment. I do not know why, but partly it reflects what Schroeder wrote about me in one of his books. Bill Baker and Manfred Schroeder both thought this was their greatest achievement. First thing is they never had anybody from India. They did not hire just from anywhere in America. To get into the research department of Bell Labs was next to impossible. Generally, you have to have a Ph.D. from MIT, Stanford or another top-ranking university. They hired me, and they were very proud of that. I could hear all these things.

When I came here Schroeder put me on a side trip. I came here in 1961. In 1962, I think it was 1962 September when the new Philharmonic Hall of New York City and Lincoln Center opened its door. The new hall was designed by Maxim Abramovitz, the leading architect of New York, and Dr. Leo Beranek (from BBN), the leading acoustician. I did not know all about this, but I read about this in The New York Times of 7 October 1962. New York City wanted a hall which would beat Carnegie Hall, and they wanted a hall which is the best hall in the world. The New York Times says in a column on the front page, “that the course of music has been set back fifty years by the opening of this hall.” I said, what? The first night was a near disaster. Resonance was almost completely lacking and lower strings could scarcely be heard.

Hellrigel:

Oh, no.

Atal:

Low means low. You know, low frequencies were missing.

Hellrigel:

[Laughs].

Atal:

Then Bell Labs got into this in an unusual way. Philharmonic Hall people called Bell Labs to help them out. AT&T could not do any business except telephone business. But they could give free technical help to the Philharmonic people. They appointed a committee of leading well-known acousticians, and we all got in a team. We started on a new journey there, and we worked for four years. We used to work at the night. We worked from 11 pm at night until 6 am in the morning. In the daytime the hall was used for orchestra rehearsals.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Atal:

One night, Leonard Bernstein walked in, and Maxim Abramovitz was sitting there. Leonard Bernstein was mad, but not about the audience. He was saying, my musicians cannot hear themselves and their colleagues. Leonard Bernstein was a very well-known name in those days. He said I cannot conduct in this hall. Then they found that the best seat in this hall is in the second balcony up the stairs. Abramovitz said, maybe people will enter from the roof and sit there in the balcony.

Hellrigel:

[Laughs]

Atal:

Ultimately, the hall was completely ripped apart. However, it never sounded great.

Hellrigel:

It still does not sound good.

Atal:

Well, it is reasonable now, but I do not know. I talked to Dr. Leo Beranek when I met him in 2013 in San Diego. He was ninety-nine years old then. I told him, when I used to see you in 1960s, we were not on talking terms because we were criticizing you for the bad acoustics. Tell me exactly what happened. I spent one hour with him talking. He said, let me tell you. He got so absorbed. He said, they did not do what I wanted them to do.

But then we got sidetracked talking about a lot of common friends and so on. It was a good conversation. Then it dawned on me that he's ninety-nine years old and standing. I went to my dinner table and sat there. His son came in and said, my father appreciates very much that you talked to him for one hour. This is because most people do not talk to older people. Young people were busy in their own affairs.

Dr. Beranek, a well-known person, was getting the IEEE Founder's Award [IEEE Founders Medal] that day and I was getting the IEEE Kilby Award [IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal]. That is how we met. Young people should recognize that Leo Beranek accomplished a lot in his life, and people should talk to him, but they did not.

Hellrigel:

Maybe they were afraid that he would be embarrassed because of the hall. Who knows?

Atal:

Dr. Beranek, although he was ninety-nine years old, gave a half an hour talk when he received the Founders Medal. Well, I talked about Licklider with Beranek, and he told me a lot about Licklider. Then Beranek said, I promised myself that at BBN, I will only hire people who are better than me. Licklider was such a person.

While working at the Philharmonic Hall problem, Dr. Schroeder got an idea that we should try to recreate the acoustics of a concert hall, such as Philharmonic Hall, in the anechoic chamber at Bell Telephone Labs at Murray Hill. In those days, we did not have surround sound and all that. We had only stereo. He said stereo sound comes only within the loudspeakers. It does not surround you in a room. When you sit in an orchestra, sound comes from everywhere. He said we had to put in a lot of loudspeakers, and I asked why do we have to put in a lot of loudspeakers? He said that is how we have to surround “by sound.” I said we have two ears, and we should need only two loudspeakers. Schroeder said, we have worked on this problem since 1932, and people have tried. There is something in the whole thing that when you take two loudspeakers, the sound is between the loudspeakers, not outside.

Hellrigel:

Wow. So, a point in between?

Atal:

Yes. I said I do not understand that through my naive training in acoustics. Two ears should require two loudspeakers to create any desired distribution in the anechoic chamber. I said, okay. I made a dummy head with two ears and put two microphones inside. I took the dummy head to the Philharmonic Hall because I was working there and made recordings in the orchestra when orchestra was playing. I brought it to the anechoic chamber at Murray Hill and put those signals back into the loudspeaker. When I heard that, the sound came from in between, so that is true.

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Atal:

I got really perplexed. What's happening? I’ve worked days after days. What's happening? Then, after looking at all this, it occurred to me that the sound from the left loudspeaker just does not go to the left ear. It also goes into the right ear. Sound from the right loudspeaker goes to the right ear as well as the left ear. There's crosstalk. Oh, that is it. I modified those two signals going to two loudspeakers and that is the tale, and it led to my very first patent [U.S. Patent Number 3,236,949, filed November 1962, granted February 1966] at Bell Telephone Labs. It came too early before the idea was used in all surround systems.

When I did that, digital computers were coming up, so I could implement my idea on a computer. I could not build the hardware. Schroeder was absolutely amazed. I said, I can put the sound anywhere, in any direction, you like, no problem, by a stereo system with only two loudspeakers. During a visit by Dr. J. C.R. Licklider (an internet pioneer), Schroeder wanted to show him this whole thing. Dr. Licklider was impressed, and he said, that is amazing. These two loudspeakers which always in stereo kept their sound in between, now produce sound everywhere you want. Schroeder felt very happy. He said, you know, I hired him from India. Schroeder was very proud of me. He went to an undue amount of effort to get me. I do not think anybody would have done that. I would be sitting in India today.

Hellrigel:

Well, it is amazing is, a lot of everything is about people knowing people.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

A phone call here, a phone call there, and unbeknownst to you, these people had the ear of the President of the United States, and they were making arrangements. They made that happen.

Atal:

Yes. I am very fortunate that this worked out so well. In fact, Schroeder was my lab director. He never asked me to do anything project wise. I did whatever I liked and that is unusual. I was again very lucky in that regard. Also, Dr. John Pierce, who is one of your history persons. John Pierce was not my lab director; he was the boss of Dr. Schroeder.

John Pierce was a very famous person. He came to welcome me as a new employee to say hello. I used to have my office in another building called Building 15 at Murray Hill. He spent several hours with me that day. I do not even remember what we talked about, but we became very close in terms of talking. Dr. Pierce was very high up. Under his management Bell Labs produced many things from transistors, laser, computers, etc. Pierce was born in 1910 and I was born in 1933, so there's a twenty-three-year difference. There was not that much to talk about in terms of technical things, but we talked about a lot of things and sometimes silly things.

One episode which I have to mention was in 1976. I was in my office, Dr. Arno Penzias, who's also one of your famous persons who won the Nobel Prize for the big bang theory. He walked in and said we have a problem. The Soviet Union is building an embassy between New York and Washington, that is directly in line of sight between the two cities. We know what's that idea. They want to monitor our communication between New York and Washington. In 1976, AT&T used microwave relays to relay telephone communication from one microwave tower to another. It was all open, and not encrypted, so anyone could hear. He asked me, “You work in the speech area, do you have something we can use to encrypt voice?” Oh, I said, of course, I have worked in the speech area, and I presented papers on this and that. He said, he was not talking about papers, he wanted to know if I had a coder to give him for encrypting voice. I scratched my head, I found I had none. Then it dawned on me there is a difference between a research career and useful work of practical importance. There is a big gap.

I went to Dr. [James L.] Flanagan, Head of Speech Research. He is another of your oral history persons. I told Flanagan, you have been in charge of this whole speech research for so long. Here for the first time, Dr. Penzias comes in needing a coder to encrypt voice, and we do not have one. How come we did not create one? Well, he gave me a little lecture and the sum total of that is we miss all these things.

John Pierce retired in 1971 and went to Caltech. During one of his visits to Bell Labs, he was walking in the corridor, so I saw him from my office. I said, John, come in for a minute into my office. John used to walk very fast, so he came right away and sat down. I told him, John, you have super-managed research in a big way. You were also very interested in speech and hearing research at Bell Labs. How is that when AT&T needs an encrypting speech coder, we do not have one? Dr. Pierce spent that day with me explaining the problem of research management. He went to great details. He called people at Bell Labs, Holmdel to get all the facts. We came to the conclusion that the bandwidth of speech in microwave relay links was 4 kHz, but our best coders could not encrypt speech below 8 kHz. There was a gap between what AT&T needed and what I had. The bad thing is that in my research, I never checked the needs of AT&T. In research, we often sidetrack the needs of the company.

Hellrigel:

You sidetracked the needs of the company in terms of product development? Or was there a gap between what the company needed immediately and what the lab staff wanted to research? Maybe there was a gap between applied research for the near and now products and the desire to do pure research for future possible products?

Atal:

We were not at the least figuring out what kind of thing AT&T needed. We were more or less cut off from all this, and it was a kind of negligence in some sense. Later, I became a little more aware of that when John Pierce spent one full day with me discussing research management and its problems. I visited him several times at Caltech. He went to CCRMA, Stanford University [Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University] where I visited him several times. The last time I saw him was 1996. I had dinner with him. My daughter used to study at Stanford, so I used to visit every year and had dinner with John Pierce.

Hellrigel:

I have a nice picture of him and his family in my IEEE Medal of Honor exhibit at the IEEE Operations Center in Piscataway, New Jersey. [insert IEEE photograph]

Atal:

Oh, I see. Very good.

Hellrigel:

Yes. I will send you a picture of the exhibit.

Atal:

I will appreciate that because he is one of the people who had a tremendous influence on me for not one year, but from 1961 to 1996. He helped me, not in terms of research, but by changing my thinking about how research should be done. This helped very early in my career at Bell Labs. It was due to the sad experience I had with AT&T communications over long distances when I could not talk to my mother. I paid $20, but only a few seconds of useful voice in my telephone call and I was upset. I said something has to be done, but I did not know anything about the subject. AT&T started work in this area in 1920 because they wanted to send human voice on telegraph lines buried under the ocean between New York and London. The project produced an outcome which kind of made a lot of waves. However, it did not produce useful speech of any kind. The only persons who used it were President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill for wartime communication for security purposes. It was not useful for commercial use.

I told John Pierce that I will follow a new course in speech. I worked in the philharmonic hall for a few years. I worked in acoustics, but I had not worked in the speech area. He said, “What will you do?” I said, “I do not know, I will think about it.”

Atal:

I will take a break for the bathroom.

Hellrigel:

Oh yes. Yes, let us you take a break.

Atal:

What happened is that, in 1965, I was taking a course at Brooklyn Poly [the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn is now the New York University Tandon School of Engineering] towards my Ph.D. It was a seminar course. They asked the students to review papers, so I picked a paper written by Dr. Peter Elias. He's also a famous IEEE member and he has a Ph.D. from MIT. He wrote a paper and in that he mentioned two important things that have happened in this world since World War II. One is work on linear prediction and the other is the work by Claude Shannon. I reviewed both papers, and it kind of changed my life from then.

The linear prediction is a very important subject. Linear prediction was kind of introduced by Prof. Norbert Wiener at MIT during World War II, but it was kept secret. When you fly and you want to shoot a plane, you have to predict the plane's behavior before you shoot anything. I discovered what Claude Shannon had done. His task at Bell Labs was to improve the quality of telephone communication. Instead, he asked a very fundamental question, why did the telephones have bad quality? It is bad because we are hitting the capacity of the telephone channel, so he produced a theorem, a “capacity theorem”. If you use anything beyond capacity, it breaks down.

Hellrigel:

Too much interference?

Atal:

Whatever it is. We tried to put in a bag more bananas than it can take.

Hellrigel:

The more bananas you stuff in beyond capacity, it creates a mush.

Atal:

Capacity theorem is fundamental. It was simple to understand. I said, instead of saying the telephone communication was bad, I said the problem is AT&T telephone lines have low capacity. I could not talk to my mother and Dr. Schroeder could not talk to me. It did not have the capacity to transmit voice properly.

Hellrigel:

No matter how thick you make the copper cable. There were similar challenges in early work in telegraphy, telephony, and electric light.

Atal:

Yes. Shannon’s Capacity theorem is a fundamental theorem which governs all digital communication. Without that theorem, the digital world will come to an end, and we will go back to the 1940s, and you can imagine what will be then.

Hellrigel:

Yes. We would be having pen pals again.

Atal:

I said we have to increase the capacity, and I told that to Dr. John Pierce and to my friends too at Bell Labs. They said, that does not work for speech. We are not working on information theory or Shannon theory here; we are working on speech and hearing. I said, this makes no sense what you're talking about.

Everybody kind of ran me down, except John Pierce did not run me down. He said, okay, go ahead. I appreciate that. When I went outside to the acoustics society [Acoustical Society of America], they said, you're talking nonsense. Speech compression research at that time was primarily in the area of channel vocoders. I was left alone. I asked, “what am I do?” Both John Pierce and Manfred Schroeder thought that I should go ahead. They did not interfere.

I started working. I needed friends and colleagues, so I started giving talks at universities to graduate students who were going for their Ph.D. work. I went to the University of California, Santa Barbara and gave a talk. I said, this is the new thing, linear prediction. Well, the students liked that for their Ph.D. thesis topic. Some of them joined in with me to pursue this topic further.

Hellrigel:

This would be the 1980s? The late 1970s?

Atal:

No. This was exactly in 1966.

There is one more thing which I must mention before I go for a break. The Vietnam war was going on. In 1968, President Nixon took charge, and he appointed David Packard who was a founder of the well-known company Hewlett-Packard. David Packard was a Deputy Secretary of Defense with Nixon. He came to see me and of course, he did not come alone. He came with William Baker, the President of Bell Labs. And his people from the National Security Agency. That was a big group of people. Then, he talked about an unusual problem. He said, “I have heard, you are working on some new things in encryption and in speech coding. In Vietnam, before our soldiers go anywhere, the Viet Cong is there to ambush them because the communication between the commander and the soldiers is heard by Viet Cong. They were talking on open channels. Do you have something or are you working on something which can make this communication secure?”

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Atal:

I was beginning in that whole area. I did not have anything like a voice coder ready. I thought I was slow in my research work. Dr. Baker intervened right away. He said, no, you are not slow. How many facilities of the human body have we duplicated? None.

I felt a little relieved that Dr. Baker defended my humbleness. Anyhow, that day, we had a very good meeting with Packard, and it lasted the whole day. Mr. Packard said, well, you make a start and work with my group at the National Security Agency to create a device to encrypt voice which can be used by our soldiers as fast as you can. I started working with the National Security Agency on this topic of encryption. And within a year Philco-Ford in Philadelphia put together a box that was just one cubic foot in size. It was used by our soldiers in Vietnam. Speech intelligibility was high, but voice quality was poor, but they used it. And, that coder was part of every red phone in the White House. That phone could be used by the President from any home in America on regular telephone lines in top secure fashion to talk to another person in America.

This secure voice coder used a simple linear prediction model of the vocal tract which limited its voice quality. The “capacity theorem” introduced by Shannon required that the transmitted signal on the telephone channel be white noise and it was a big challenge to convert the white noise to a high-quality speech signal at the telephone receiver. This was accomplished by using the technique of code-excited linear prediction. It led to a patent [U.S. Patent Number 4,472,832) filed December 1981 and granted January 1984]. I worked alone for many years. It was a difficult situation because it involved doing research which required that I use an extremely fast computer. In the 1970s, the Cray was the fastest computer, and it was used by the computing facilities at Bell Labs. They used to charge me $2,000 an hour for processing fees.

Hellrigel:

Oh my gosh.

Atal:

Processing one second of a speech used to take about 100 seconds on the Cray and at $2,000 an hour it was a huge amount of money. And within a month, I spent the whole budget of my department on computers. Dr. Flanagan, my department head, came to me and said, “what are you doing?” I said, “I am using Cray for my research on code-excited linear prediction. He said, “We cannot no, no, no.”

This is another good thing about Bell Labs. Mr. Flanagan went to the upper management. I do not know what happened. They decided to buy a single- processor Cray for research. The Cray processor was very expensive. It cost half-a-million dollars. This research made it possible that by 1983, I could announce that we had a clean high-quality working coder which could encrypt voice. A worldwide effort led to a reduction in the complexity of the coder. This new voice encrypting coder had both high intelligibility and high voice quality. We told the NSA people, here it is. Oh, they went with super speed and implemented it. This coder was then used in the Gulf War 1990-1991. Every soldier in America at that time in the Gulf War had that coder in his bag, so he could talk to other soldiers and the commanders. Saddam Hussein could not hear anything. It worked. That project started in 1968 and it was ultimately finished in 1994. People at the National Security Agency wrote me a letter saying that they were very happy. This is before we had cellphones. The side trip I took and a journey which started by David Packard in 1968 took almost twenty years, but it succeeded and succeeded beyond success because it helped America in a very big way.

Hellrigel:

It is amazing.

Atal:

Let me take a break now.

Hellrigel:

Yes, let us take a fifteen-minute break.

Atal:

I must walk. One should not sit on a chair that long. Yes.

Hellrigel:

Well, yes. I cannot, or I should not, be sitting too long either. Let us meet again at 4:30 p.m. That would be twenty-two minutes.

Atal:

Okay. And then subtract 4:30 p.m. minus three would be 1:30.

Hellrigel:

Yes, 4:30 p.m. minus three hours, would be 1:30 p.m. on the west coast.

Atal:

1:30, right? Okay. Good.

Hellrigel:

Yes, sir.

Atal:

We have been going in unchartered water, back and forth, back and forth. I hope you will put them in some fashion that makes sense.

Hellrigel:

Yes. We will reorganize things. We will be able to do that.

Atal:

Yes. I thought we could reorganize. It may be very difficult. Things come up and we talk about them.

Hellrigel:

Do not worry, we can reorganize our discussion a bit to add clarity. We can reorganize, but I will stop recording now. I will keep the line open. If something wacky happens, then we just start a new WebEx meeting.

Atal:

Very good.

Atal:

Yes. I will say stop the video at this moment.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Yes. I will stop recording.

Atal:

Fine, thank you. 1:30, my time.

Hellrigel:

Yes, sir. Okay.

Atal:

Thank you, Mary Ann

Hellrigel:

Bye-bye. See you again shortly.

Can you hear me? You're on mute. I cannot hear you. You're on mute.

Atal:

Now? Can you hear me now?

Hellrigel:

Yes, I can hear you, sir.

Atal:

Okay. I did not press the right button.

Brooklyn Polytech

Hellrigel:

Yes. Now we're up and running. It is recording again. Part 1 was fun. I did not realize we had spent so much time already, but that was fun, and we're smack in the center of your career.

I do have one question. You got your Ph.D. at Brooklyn Poly. It is my understanding that was common for Bell people to attend Brooklyn Poly. Nevertheless, why did you pick, Brooklyn Poly and not Stevens Institute of Technology or NJIT?

Atal:

Very good question. As I told you earlier, I wanted to work and also study. The question is where I will study? You mentioned Stevens Institute of Technology and others. In fact, when I came to Bell Labs in the first year, I thought Rutgers University in New Jersey would be a good choice. It was only a half-an-hour drive from Murray Hill. Then I went to my lab director, Dr. David, and told him that I want to do my Ph.D. and I want to study at Rutgers. He said, why Rutgers? I said Rutgers is convenient. It is only a half-an-hour away. Parking is not a problem and so on. He said, you do not do things in life because they're convenient. If you do not want to do things right, then do not do them. You can save all the time. He said, I am going to call Dr. Ernst Webber, president of Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, and you can apply to Brooklyn Polytechnic. I was not sure whether I could get admission into Brooklyn Poly. He said, no problem. Just see him. Well, I did not have any questions to ask him. Dr. David was absolutely clear that “you do not do things in life because they're convenient, you do things in life because that is how things should be done.”

Hellrigel:

Why did he think Brooklyn Poly was a better place?

Atal:

I did not ask him because I was just a newcomer; he was the lab director and Dr. Webber was his personal friend. It turned out that it was a good choice.

I still wanted to do my research at Bell Telephone Labs, so I looked into some issues very carefully. Who will be my thesis advisor? I chose Professor Mischa Schwartz as my thesis advisor. I also had to do some coursework. I had detail records of what I had done at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. I passed that on to the Brooklyn Poly. They said that they'll give me a credit equal to a master’s degree for that, so I had to do only the course work required for Ph.D. students if they had already done their master's degree.

I took some of the most advanced courses. My record was absolutely superb because I got an A or A plus in every course. I had to take a pre-qualifying exam before going on to the thesis. I had two advisors, one from mathematics and one from physics, and Professor Schwartz. The advisors from physics and mathematics were asking inconvenient questions; have you taken this physics course, have you taken that math course, and all this. Prof. Schwartz said, “he's going to find all this out when he does his thesis work.” They sensed that Schwartz did not want any more questions being asked. I got through my qualifying thing quickly.

Hellrigel:

Did you take courses with Webber?

Atal:

No. I took one course from Professor Papoulis, a very famous Professor at Brooklyn Poly. There were other professors, but I think courses from Professor Schwartz were very good.

This was a long journey. I had to drive from Murray Hill to Brooklyn Poly. It took me through New York traffic, and it took quite a bit of time. I used to leave at 4:00 pm and come back at night at 9:00 pm.

Hellrigel:

That is a long day.

Atal:

Just before I was about to start my thesis work, Professor Schwartz said I am going to go for a one-year sabbatical to France. I delayed for one year and did not start, but I was working at Bell Labs, so no problem. What kind of topic would I work on? My thesis topic was recognizing speakers' identity on a computer, not the speech, not the voice content, but who spoke what. That is called sometimes speaker identification or sometimes speaker verification. The computer figures out who spoke the material.

Now this is very interesting; Professor Schwartz said, you have never worked in the speech area. You have worked in acoustics. You know nothing about speech. I know nothing about speech and you're going to do your thesis work on speech. That is very good. You will learn and I will learn, so let us learn together.

Hellrigel:

But that is convenient.

Atal:

Pardon?

Hellrigel:

That is convenient that you both learned together.

Atal:

And Professor Schwartz wanted to learn new things. We have been friends for very long time.

Hellrigel:

Is he at NJIT now?

Atal:

No. He moved to Columbia University, where he is the Professor Emeritus of Electrical engineering. He is 96, I think. I have not talked or corresponded with him for some years. Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn is called now New York University.

Hellrigel:

Yes. They merged.

Atal:

They merged.

Hellrigel:

At this point, you're not only balancing full time work at Bell Labs and Ph.D. work, you also have a growing family.

Speech projects

Atal:

Okay, coming back to the family. Of course, I was married in 1959. We had our first daughter in 1962 and I postponed the second daughter a little longer because due to all this workload of Ph.D. and Bell Labs. My second daughter was born in 1970.

Hellrigel:

Your first daughter; I've got the picture of them.

Atal:

Yes, Alka is my first daughter.

Hellrigel:

Alka.

Atal:

Alka is a medical doctor at Everett Clinic, located here in Everett, Washington. Let me tell you about my second daughter, Namita. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri because her husband works there. He's a medical doctor. She studied at the Washington University in St. Louis, received a master’s degree in molecular biology, and continued to do medical research. She preferred to stay home to take care of the family. She has two children.

But you know, I got some little side projects. Here is an example of a side project. My first daughter, Alka, went to India in 1968 or so. Maybe 1968, 1969, I think. We used to speak English at home in New Jersey, so we did not speak Hindi. She went to India for two months. There, everybody spoke Hindi. When she came back at end of August before the school year, she was speaking fluent Hindi.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Atal:

I asked myself, how did she learn? Did somebody teach her? No. Children were playing together. She was only seven years old, or six-and-a-half or so. How did she learn in Hindi? A lot of Hindi sounds had nothing to do with English sounds. How did she learn?

Hellrigel:

It is information, yes.

Atal:

I read books but I did not know where to start. Then one idea hit. My daughter was listening to Indian sounds. She had to figure out how her tongue and jaw and lips should move. It is a conversion problem. How to convert a bunch of numbers representing speech to positions of articulators in the vocal tract? Then it struck me that you could represent the speech signal in a multi-dimensional, non-linear space. I immediately went to work. I created an artificial vocal tract on the computer. It was a program to produce speech.

The computer program figured out from the speech where the articulators were.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Atal:

I presented a paper describing my research on this topic at the 1974 Speech Communication Seminar, Stockholm.

Hellrigel:

How did your daughter feel about being your test object?

Atal:

I do not know. She was speaking fluent Hindi and I got worried that she has forgotten English. No, no, she did not. The English came back right away.

Hellrigel:

Did she keep the Hindi speaking skill?

Atal:

Yes, she can speak Hindi. My younger daughter did not go to India that much. She did not learn Hindi. My older daughter knows enough Hindi to go to India, visit families and speak there, no problem.

Hellrigel:

That is phenomenal.

Atal:

Yes. I think children should be exposed to a foreign language. As many foreign languages as early as possible because that is a natural ability we have.

Hellrigel:

That is what the experts say. I know my nieces and nephews, started studying Spanish in their early grammar school years. But then the school system dropped the instruction program. Thus far, one studied Spanish in high school and he was skilled in that language, but I do not think his siblings continued studying Spanish. However, they took some courses in American Sign Language, even in college.

Atal:

Yes. I think language ability is good. Both of my daughters also learned Spanish. They are quite good in Spanish.

Hellrigel:

Yes. I can understand the language I studied better than I can speak it. Speaking is more difficult than reading it.

Atal:

Yes. That is right. So which language you understand?

Hellrigel:

Italian. I can speak a little and read. I had two years of Italian in high school

Atal:

That is good.

Hellrigel:

In my field, I am functional in Italian, and I can read German with the aid of a dictionary. Once I realized that the words just got longer and longer, I figured out how to read German. I can read in my field, electric light, heat, and power. In my field, I can get by reading French, too.

Atal:

The secret of learning is living amongst people who speak that language.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Atal:

You'll learn very fast. In Bell Labs, we used to have a German table, we used to have an English table, and a French table. Dr. Schroeder was very good at many languages. He used to sit at these tables, and you learn by just listening. It is kind of fantastic.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Yes, because when he had experience in German and English and then French. In college, especially graduate school, the science programs often required you to study German to read technical journals.

Atal:

Yes. He was very good. He was very good in languages.

Hellrigel:

During your career, a lot of times, you found yourself increasingly involved in speech projects.

Atal:

Yes. The room acoustics work stopped in 1968. I finished my Ph.D. at Brooklyn Polytechnic then. From then onwards, I went to the speech side, and I went on working to advance this area of linear prediction. The hardware for implementing the code-excited linear predictive coder was evolving fast. The chips which were necessary to produce such a hardware were getting better.

In the late 1960s, Dr. Gordon Moore said a very important thing. He said, “that the number of components which go on a chip is increasing 30 percent every year.” This has a very important implication. When I tested my coder on Cray, it was taking about 100 times real time of Cray to process speech. One of my friends, who was in the semi-conductor area at Bell Labs, said at that time, you worked on something which takes 100 times real time on Cray -- I mean, this does not require much of imagination that this thing you are doing will never be practical. Each Cray was a 10-million-dollar computer.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Atal:

So, are you going to give a one-billion-dollar gadget to everybody to talk? It is useless work. I said, look, they're putting 30 percent more components on a chip every year. Ultimately, it will become practical because 30 percent more components on a chip is a powerful thing. People did not take this very seriously.

One more episode I will point out. In the 1970s, we had a person as the Vice President of AT&T from IBM. He gave a talk. And he said that he knew that chip capacity is increasing 30 percent every year and said, the cost of your switches will go down 30 percent every year, but your obligation to serve your retirees will not go down 30 percent every year. That cost will remain, and you will go bankrupt. Now, I was not on the business side. That is interesting. AT&T should have listened and cared, but no one listened carefully and that is exactly what happened. Ultimately, AT&T by the middle 2000s went bankrupt. It is simple. That is, if your cost does not decrease and your income goes down, down, one day, business will be out of proportion.

Hellrigel:

Should they have looked into some other type of product development?

Atal:

Well, this is the whole life history of AT&T? You should, IEEE should, do some project on that. That is a very good question. They made a lot of changes, but nothing worked. Although the world was changing very fast, the people still wanted to live in a comfortable zone of small changes. It is a mismatch. To deal with large changes, you have to change your thinking by a large amount.

Revolutionary changes came from Bell Labs! All this happened during the lifetime of AT&T from the 1970s to 2000. We had at least three major revolutions; fiber optics, semi-conductors and wireless.

Hellrigel:

Wireless. Yes, cellphones.

Atal:

Three revolutions. One revolution is enough to create a new company. We had three. I was once sitting in the New York Public Library in 1998 or so. We used to have a yearly meeting of all AT&T management people.

That evening, at the table I was there, myself and my wife. The AT&T Chief Financial Officer was there. He was part of the office of the CEO. He was sitting there. We were talking here and there, and we got a little bit comfortable talking. I had to be careful because he was Chief Financial Officer of AT&T. I asked him a question. I said three revolutions have happened, how come AT&T missed all of them? He did not take it in an offensive way. He came from Canada when AT&T acquired a satellite company. He said, no, we get Dr. Penzias or somebody telling us what advancement we are making in our knowledge, and we depend on the technical side on the Bell Labs telling us what changes are coming. No, it is not clear to me that Bell Labs cannot tell AT&T what product and what service it should produce.

That is a complicated question because Bell Labs has no expertise in this matter. Bell Labs can only create technology, but technology is not a product. We were mismatched, and this I saw myself personally. We go all the way with technology and then it is dropped right away because the people at the other end feel very uncomfortable putting this in practice into the system because they are not sure whether customers would adopt it. So, it is not enough to have knowledge. It is not enough to have technology. It is enough to know how to produce a product. You have to produce a product and then sell it.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Atal:

Very difficult. Now, Tesla is an example of a company which has done that. But outside Tesla, why are there not many more successful electric car companies?

Hellrigel:

We will see. Recently, Tesla has had a number of recalls and reliability issues with its electric cars.

Atal:

This will happen. In the early stages, AT&T was fighting for its survival. Look at AT&T's history from 1895 to 1915.

Hellrigel:

That was a very eager AT&T in a competitive era.

Atal:

At that time, we had a great president of AT&T, Theodore Vail. It was very difficult and that is why most companies do not take revolutions in a very smooth way. They get wiped out.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Atal:

Partly, it is employees. The employees do not change easily. They feel uncomfortable with changes. They are not sure whether they will succeed or not. This is history. Whether it is General Motors or whether it is another company, they're all the same story. Toyota succeeded, but GM did not succeed as much in the 1970s.

Hellrigel:

The American car industry was terrible in the 1970s.

Atal:

Yes. We are seeing the same thing with IBM.

Hellrigel:

Yes. They've become so embedded in the way they do things and change is hard.

Atal:

Whether it is AT&T or IBM it is the same story. It is a human problem. To make a revolutionary change, everyone has to be part of the revolution, and that means you shake up your life completely.

Hellrigel:

Yes. I know in publishing the big shake-up has been eBooks.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Now open access journals are challenging the profit structure of academic and popular presses, IEEE, and others. They are trying to look at that change and figure out a new strategy. I do not know, but I rather read a book than an eBook.

Atal:

I do not know. I am not on the business side, so I do not understand all these issues. I can read an article and say, oh yes, these are issues. Take Steve Jobs. He was a phenomenal unique kind, but Apple went through such a torturous rigmarole in the very beginning when he produced the Mac.

In the 1980s, Steve Jobs came twice to Bell Labs. He gave a talk in the Bell Labs auditorium, and he talked about Mac, which was sold in 1985 for $2,500. His talk impressed me; I told my daughter to buy a Mac, at a discount of 25 percent, from the bookstore.

Hellrigel:

Oh, she was at the University of Rochester?

Atal:

Yes, so she brought it and gave it to me. Well, that Mac could not do anything useful. I only did Mac Paint on that. And those floppy disks. It took me two days to load Office there.

Hellrigel:

[Laughter] But they were cute. I remember the design and that later models came in different colors.

Atal:

That was Mac. That was the beginning. That culture is being carried on by Tim Cook, the current president. I am so impressed with Steve Jobs and his thinking. What cultivates these ideas for young people? You do not go on a straight line. If you believe something is right, do it. You'll fail, but if you've part of the problem answered. Ha, ha. Someone else will take it. If we do the experiment, will have not one but many Steve Jobs!

Hellrigel:

Right. Well, Thomas Edison commented that success takes a lot of work and entails a lot of failure. If I recall correctly, he said something like genius is 99 percent perspiration. You learn a lot of both. Sometimes profit motivation in corporations makes failures and change too costly, so people shun away from them.

Atal:

Yes, but Edison also went through very difficult times.

Hellrigel:

Oh, and many of his businesses did not make considerable profits. They were technologically adventuresome, but not profitable. The prime example is his ore milling business.

Atal:

Yes. Apple did not make any money until 19-something, near the year 2000. It was a very difficult time.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes. Yes, it is the P-word, progress. It is an interesting time. Yes, I know from looking at the history of AIEE, IRE and then IEEE and trying to figure out where things are going. Sometimes, you can look at where things are going by when a new council or society is founded, when a new conference is held, or when a new journal begins publication. Then the challenges include when do you sunset journals? IEEE has around, so many publications. At IEEE, I do not know when you stop publishing, sunset, a journal or a magazine. When and who decides to cease publication? You have the same considerations for starting a new publication.

Atal:

Same thing. It is the same kind of decision.

Leisure time, business trips

Hellrigel:

I have another family related question and then we will move on with your career. You were so busy. What did you and your family do for fun? I talked to another gentleman who said he learned to play tennis a little later in life. When he learned to calm down a little bit.

Atal:

Yes. I was bad in that regard. Because in India, in my childhood, I was busy taking care of my father's business. There was no time to do any sports.

Hellrigel:

Instruments?

Atal:

No. That is a great deficiency I had. When I came to United States, I had time. I did travel a lot. I visited foreign countries and that was always my interest, to learn about foreign countries.

Hellrigel:

And so that was the family vacation. You'd pack up and go.

Atal:

Yes. We did a lot of visiting.

Hellrigel:

Were they IEEE related trips, or did you get to separate business and family?

Atal:

IEEE played a small role in foreign trips. IEEE had a big role in things around this country. In Europe, IEEE is not big, there are other European organizations which compete with IEEE.

Hellrigel:

Yes. One of the first oral histories I recorded for the IEEE History Center was with a gentleman living in Massachusetts. Julian Bussgang spoke about family vacations, and he also mentioned that he built his lab close to his home. He had his own private laboratory and business, so he purposely built the lab close to his house so he could come home every night for supper, and then, if necessary, he could go back to work. It was close enough.

Atal:

Good idea. Different people should find different things. At a young age, I acquired an interest in reading. Reading books and magazines became kind of a game for me. It is a kind of entertainment. A new book, new authors, new topics, and I enjoy all that.

Hellrigel:

What do you read; science or history or something else?

Atal:

It changes. Of course, I read science. While at Bell Labs I read scientific books, but I have a great interest in economics. I think we need a revolution in our understanding in this area. It is a very complex subject. And now, we have entered an information economy and principles introduced by Claude Shannon are applicable.

Hellrigel:

By economics, sir, are you also talking about the stock market?

Atal:

Oh, that is even more difficult.

Hellrigel:

Right. Even the price of things and commodities are difficult to predict.

Atal:

Yes, there is one result which is very interesting. I was sitting in Manfred Schroeder's office one day and Claude Shannon walked in.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Atal:

Yes. We talked, and it was about me, so I listened like a careful listener. When Shannon left, Manfred Schroeder remarked that Shannon had made a lot of money in the stock market. Out of nowhere this came in, I did not grasp it. What was Shannon doing in the stock market. I did not understand this, so I kind of checked what that comment meant. I did not ask Schroeder, but I asked some other colleagues.

Then what happened? In 1956, my Bell Labs colleague, John L. Kelly, Jr., was watching a TV show, “The $64,000 Question.” This was a program about gambling, and it was a popular program. There's a phrase called, “Gambler's Ruin.” You know, gamblers get ruined because they gamble without understanding what gambling is. They think we will win, and they do, and bet, and ultimately, they lose all their money. What should they do? John Kelly watched the show and concluded that a gambler should optimize a compound return, just as an investor in stocks does. Within the next few weeks, he wrote a paper, “How to Avoid Gambler's Ruin” for publication in BSTJ. It used to be called Bell Systems Technical Journal. The paper went to the management, and they did not like this title. We do not work on gambling problems; we work with telecommunication business problems. Then they convinced him to change the title and the title of the paper became, “A New Interpretation of Information Rate.” [Laughter]. The paper with the revised title was published in the July 1956 issue of the BSTJ. Shannon got very interested in Kelly’s paper. Shannon and John Kelly used to go out to Las Vegas quite often.

Hellrigel:

That is interesting.

Atal:

That' a very difficult game to play because if those people figured out that you know something, they will kill you.

Hellrigel:

They take the house.

Atal:

Huh?

Hellrigel:

They say when you win in Las Vegas, you beat the house, because the casino is the house.

Atal:

Coming back to the theory part. The paper is a little complex, but the main idea in very simple terms is the following: If you have a number of stocks or whatever it is, what you should you maximize? You should maximize the logarithm of the current value of the portfolio. Many people optimize the arithmetic average. If you lose too many times while trading stocks, the arithmetic mean becomes zero at the end. Kelly proposed optimizing the geometric mean.

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Atal:

The geometric mean is percent wise. You gain 50 percent, you gain 40 percent, or you lose 20 percent, but geometric mean never goes to zero unless you multiply by zero. The geometric mean uses multiplications. The arithmetic mean uses additions and subtractions. That is a very good insight. You never get to zero in geometric mean. You'll get smaller numbers, but unless it is a dishonest gambling pit, house, I think you will recover.

Hellrigel:

Right. Yes.

Atal:

Actually, Shannon did make a lot of good money in the stock market.

Hellrigel:

Well, that is interesting. I can understand why the company and the editors of the Bell Telephone System Tech Journal may not have wanted the word gambling in the title of an article. [Laughter]

Atal:

No, the trouble is that if somebody reads this, they'd say, well, Bell Labs is wasting money.

AT&T Labs

Hellrigel:

Yes, I see that point. You had a long career working at Bell Labs and then it became AT&T Labs.

Atal:

Yes. I will tell you how it became AT&T Labs.

First, you can split my Bell Labs career into a few pieces. First, of course, I started as a researcher. I did research and published papers. I was very happy. By 1983, my Lab director, Max Mathews, proposed that I advance to the management route, so they put me as supervisor, the head of department. He gave the pros and cons, and I said, okay, I will take it. I became a head of department.

Hellrigel:

Did you have a choice to stay in research? If you stayed in research, would you have earned less money?

Atal:

I did not have a choice. I loved research and people. The people in the research area were great people. I enjoyed talking to them because they were unique people with tremendous insights and abilities.

Hellrigel:

Since you started in 1961, at this point you were at Bell Labs about twenty-two years.

Atal:

Yes, I was. You say, oh, I should become a manager, and you have a title. I learnt that people liked titles. In the old days, we had just one title, MTS “Member of the Technical Staff.” Everybody had the same title.

Hellrigel:

Now you're a department head and you get a little bit more money,

Atal:

Money, maybe yes or not. The title tells the society, wow, I am advancing, and you feel oh, you have become a better person!

Hellrigel:

Yes, you advanced.

Atal:

[Laughter] This is a human habit and I fell into that trap, and I accepted that. But as a side comment, in AT&T we used to have management meetings once a month. This was the second AT&T, not the old AT&T. In the second AT&T, Mike Armstrong [C. Michael Armstrong] was the CEO. Once upon a time, the CEO of AT&T had a lot of paraphernalia going around him. But by the time Mr. Armstrong was CEO, he used to carry his coffee cup in the hand, so I thought that times were changing. He mentioned that the title was bothering him. He said, people waste my time, they want titles, so I've told them you select the title. If you want, we will call you His Majesty, The Majesty, or the Highest Person in the Whole Universe. I will give you the title. Titles will not save AT&T, but people are after titles. That is a human weakness.

Hellrigel:

Yes, title seekers can be a problem.

Atal:

Instead, they should be enjoying their work and success and feeling happy with what they're doing. You fall into the trap. I fell into the same trap in 1983. I said yes, I should become department head, why not? Oh, then I will have eight to ten people working for me. Then I will do their merit review. Ah, it looks very good in the beginning. I was a manager from 1983 to 1996, and I went into that management trap. What a waste of time, because a lot of time was spent in the merit review process. The merit reviews were relatively simple in the 1960s. By the 1970s, bureaucratic requirements came in. You had to write a report. Reports were short at first, but by the 1980s reports started expanding. Everyone had to write first one page, then two pages, then three pages, then four pages. I spent several months of the year writing reviews, laying out with words and there was no meaning to this.

Hellrigel:

Reviews of everybody in your department

Atal:

We have not invented a system to manage all this process. On top of it, after the raises were known, people asked “was his raise higher than other people.” Can everybody be rated higher than other people? That is impossible! [Laughter].

Hellrigel:

That management story, the saga, continues.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Regarding the review processes, from my perspective it appears that some consulting companies have made a lot of money creating these packages to sell to companies to review people. Might it be done more simply and be more organization or company specific as opposed to a commercial product purchased from a consultant? Today, so many people want numbers, they want to quantify everything; however, so activities are not quantifiable. Yet, you have to count. How many of X did I do, or Y did I do. As if activities are interchangeable.

Atal:

Yes, right. There's no solution. There's no solution. People want recognition by others in ways which are destructive.

Hellrigel:

Then did you find yourself spending more time doing management reviews and not getting much time for your own research because you are managing?

Atal:

That is it. I was essentially wasting time. There was no time for research on top of it. Nah.

Hellrigel:

In terms of staffing and staffing-wise, is AT&T or is it Bell Labs at this point? Are they downsizing, laying off people, and shrinking the lab at this point

Atal:

Which one?

Hellrigel:

In 1983, when you had that post, was business taking a downward turn at Bell Labs? Did the company and you have to make the decision to lay people off? Did you have to fire people?

Atal:

No, we were wasting time and attending meetings -- so many meetings. Then we acquired NCR. We acquired new companies and all sorts of superfluous activities that had nothing to do with AT&T's health. This was part of my life and part of my experiences. I went through this, but by 1996, I was convinced that I wanted no more of that. In fact, there was another problem, how do you get out of management? If you go out of management, people say you are dismissed, right?

Hellrigel:

Right.

Atal:

You resign, and people say, why are you resigning? All these new questions come in. In fact, I have never looked for a job in my whole life. The Bell Labs job came by a telephone interview. In 1996, I decided I will change jobs. This management business does not work, but I did not know which job to take or where to go. Indeed, I went very seriously into a job search for about six months or so, but each one of them involved moving out of Murray Hill and New Jersey and going to a new place.

I went to Carnegie Mellon and right away they gave me a professorship offer. Good. Then I found that I had to live forty-five minutes away and commute forty-five minutes each way every day. I used to live very near Bell Labs where I worked. Ultimately, thinking along those lines, I decided not to take this burden of commuting every day.

Hellrigel:

Why did you have to commute? Did you have the long commute because you could not afford to live in downtown Pittsburgh?

Atal:

No. I did not want to live in downtown Pittsburgh. You could buy a little apartment or something in downtown Pittsburgh, but I did not like that downtown area. Then I went to a place called Oregon Graduate Institute. It used to be called OGI. They were very interested in me. They were located in Hillsboro, Oregon and there was more than one-half-hour of commuting. Hillsboro had a lot of technical companies there. It was a very nice place. However, I did not like living in Portland or living in a faraway place. OGI was serious and offered me a very good position. Ultimately, I decided to stay in Murray Hill, but then Larry Rabiner worked out another deal. He came one day with a proposal. He said we will give you a management job without management.

Hellrigel:

That is an intriguing offer.

Atal:

He set a job; he created all this. He got the approval to create a post called “chief technology officer”. Now, I said, that looks good. I said, I will join. David Nagel, who worked for Apple before he came to AT&T, interviewed me. He asked me, “What will you work on?” I said, I do not know what I will work on, but I will not work in any area I have worked on before because my greatest problem is everyone thinks I am an expert. They do not discuss with me, they do not criticize me, and I feel useless. I said, I will not work anymore in the speech area. I have finished one aspect of speech; the coders are going into the pipeline, and they will appear one day and everybody's kind of thing to use. He said that he was not sure what I was talking about. So, what will you work on? I said, give me a couple of days and I thought about it.

What should I do? Suppose I start my life from scratch, what will I work on? I found one area which kind of baffled me. I am sitting, and a telephone call from a friend came in. He just said his name. The moment I heard his name, I accessed from my brain memory all the information I needed to carry a conversation. How do I do it? Brain memory is extremely large. How do I search such a large memory in such a short time and talk with my friend? I thought about a lot of things. I was very intrigued.

On top of it, in 1997, Google was coming up rapidly into the search area and searching was becoming an important topic. I told David Nagel that I wanted to work on how the brain searches human memory. He liked the idea. Now, the job of chief technology officer was a management-level position with no management responsibility.

Hellrigel:

What did he expect out of that?

Atal:

I do not know. When I mentioned the topic “how the brain searches human memory” to David Nagel, he ultimately connected to something. Earlier he worked at NASA’s Ames Research Center. He mentioned some work by Dr. Pentti Kanerva at NASA Ames Research Center suggesting that search is carried out in a very high dimensional space in the brain. I do not know whether that is true or not, but what are the implications? In a very high dimensional space, the distribution of distances between different members from the same pattern is very narrow. I thought this made sense. I started applying this idea for speech recognition. That kept me busy. I worked on this project for nearly four years. It led to a patent [U.S. Patent Number 7,006,969, filed on 1 November 2001 and granted 28 February 2006].

Hellrigel:

You got to keep your house and you got to keep your office. Okay, a different office in the building, and you got a whole new research topic, which was a refresher.

Atal:

Yes. I felt good because I learnt something new.

Hellrigel:

When you're doing this, did you have people helping you do the research and find the articles in a literature search? Did you have a staff with secretaries, clerks, and research assistants?

Atal:

No, this is a very good question. I had a secretary who helped. At Bell Labs I did have people with whom I worked. I used to get lot of people from European countries, Israel, etc. for research work and took part in discussions with them. Anything which I worked on myself I worked alone because I found it is too much of a burden to explain everything to another person.

Hellrigel:

It gives you a headache?

Atal:

I worked alone on the most serious problems and found out the answer. It was a slow and sometimes a long process, but that is how it went.

Patents

Hellrigel:

I know you have a number of patents, so where does your patent work come in?

Atal:

Well, I have several patents. My most important patent, “Digital Speech Coder,” U.S. Patent Number 4,472,832, was filed in December 1981 and granted in January 1984. It was on the technique of code-excited linear prediction and included 39 claims. Two additional claims 40 and 41 were added in September 1986 and a new patent “Digital Speech Coder” was issued as RE. 32,580 on 19 January 1988. This patent is often mentioned as ’580 patent. The speech coding technology described in the ’580 patent became a global standard and contributed to a revolution in telecommunications around the world.

A patent provides its owner with the right to exclude others from using an invention. Most companies paid royalties to AT&T for use of this patent. Microsoft used this patent in its Windows Operating System products without paying a royalty. Originally patents were applied to the manufacture of tangible goods, but with the expanding use of computers patent laws were also applied to intangible components such as software. There was an intense debate over whether software should be granted patent protection. However, in 1981 the Supreme Court held that a device using computer software (which was an integral part of the device) was a patentable object. The Court stated that while software algorithms themselves may not be patented, devices that utilized them may.

The breakup of the Bell System in 1984 led to major changes at Bell Labs towards products and away from research and patents. The Bell Labs patent department people who worked with me left Bell Labs and I found that no one was taking interest in the developing patent problem between Microsoft and AT&T. The situation changed for the better after the birth of a new AT&T with its restructuring in 1996. The new AT&T had an excellent legal department that engaged promptly in the patent dispute with Microsoft. There is an interesting story I was told about the ’580 patent. All speech patents at Bell Labs stayed with Bell Labs/Lucent, except the ’580 patent. AT&T sent a letter to Microsoft in April 1999 charging that Microsoft failed to obtain a license to use the ’580 patent technology, and it filed a lawsuit in April 2001 in the District Court of New York against Microsoft for infringing its patent. I started reading material on intellectual property matters. For the Windows Operating System, the patent is only infringed when Windows is installed on a computer creating an infringing “apparatus.” The form of software claim makes a big difference. As a practical matter, a patent application that includes software is prepared through creative techniques of drafting claims in the patent. Claim construction is often an important task in patent litigation. The ’580 patent had forty-three claims, but the number was reduced to just thirteen by claim construction.

I have never attended a judicial trial. It was a new experience. I heard for the first time a new word “deposition”. I had to give a deposition before lawyers from Microsoft which I did here at a local Marriott hotel in my hometown Mukilteo. Most of the deposition was focused on proving that I was lying. At six o'clock in the evening, the second day of the discovery, they said, “we will see you in the court.” I never had been in a court room sitting on those hard benches.

Hellrigel:

Those are hard wooden benches in the courtroom.

Atal:

Yes, tough. So anyhow, I did. In the courtroom, there was The Judge, The Jury, Lawyers from AT&T and Microsoft, and the witnesses. In order to better understand the technology covered by the ’580 patent, the judge agreed to a tutorial, and I gave a PowerPoint presentation explaining how do we produce speech, how do articulators move, and so on. The judge liked that.

The technology covered in a patent cannot appear in a printed publication before the patent is filed. I always made sure that this rule was followed. Microsoft claimed that I gave an oral presentation at an ICASSP meeting that violated this rule. Microsoft obtained sworn statements from the chair and vice-chair of the ICASSP conference about the date of my presentation at the ICASSP meeting and a declaration from the Drexel University librarian when my ICAASP paper was borrowed from the library. I provide this example as an illustration of the tactics used in the court. First the AT&T lawyers and later Microsoft Lawyers asked me a lot of questions in the courtroom. It was a new experience for me. Several of my friends were present in the courtroom, brought in by Microsoft for testifying against me.

Hellrigel:

They moved from Bell or AT&T to Microsoft.

Atal:

Well, different people. Different types of people, some university professors and some worked at Bell Labs, moved out to university and so on and so on. AT&T was saying Microsoft is using the technology covered in their patent. Microsoft was saying they are not. That is a legal argument. I enjoyed what the judge was saying. You're always amused how this thing goes. Microsoft questioned almost everything, but the Judge ruled them out. The District Court Judge gave a talk a couple of years ago where he discussed the ’580 patent issues in detail. [William H. Pauley, III, “AT&T v. Microsoft: A District Judge’s Perspective,” American University Law Review, Volume 66, Issue 4, Federal Circuit Issue, 27 January 2017.] The law firm that was helping AT&T in this case was Cooley Godward from Palo Alto, California. AT&T sought damages for every copy of Windows installed on domestically manufactured computers. AT&T won in the District Court and in the Appeals Court. The Appeals Court must be in Washington, D.C.!

Hellrigel:

I think so.

Atal:

Yes. AT&T sought also damages for every copy of Windows that had been installed on computers abroad. For computers made abroad, Microsoft shipped a so-called “golden master” disk containing the Windows software to the foreign manufacturer who, in turn, made multiple copies of the software on the “golden master” and installed the copies on the computers that were eventually sold abroad. The case went to the Supreme Court.

Hellrigel:

I do remember reading it.

Atal:

Oral arguments were held on February 26, 2007, in front of eight justices, with Justice Roberts recusing himself due to a conflict of interest. The question before the Supreme Court was “Does Microsoft’s liability extend to computers made in another country when loaded with Windows software copied from a master disk dispatched by Microsoft from the United States?” The answer was “No.”

Career reflections

Hellrigel:

With the exception of these legal shenanigans, have you been pretty content with your career? You stayed at AT&T, leaving in 2001, 2002, when you retired.

Atal:

Yes. My daughter lives here in the state of Washington, and I wanted to be here.

At some stage, I decided it was time to quit, enough of all these things. At AT&T Labs I was doing work on this memory problem, which I could do anywhere, so I decided that I have to end my career at age seventy years old roughly. AT&T was also kind of blowing apart at the time, so I said, time to quit.

Hellrigel:

True. And were you content with your career, happy with your career?

Atal:

I will say very much so. Bell Labs people were absolutely marvelous. I am talking of at least a dozen people. I used to go down to their offices before leaving for home and talk. Just talking to them was like a little—

Hellrigel:

Who are some of your buddies that you would go talk to?

Atal:

Well, there were so many of them. Not necessarily in the speech area, and Doug McIlroy [Malcolm Douglas McIlroy] was one of them. The atmosphere at Bell Labs was absolutely out of the ordinary. Everyone was so helpful. These days we use the “document” program, but I remember those days when there was no document program. I had a paper written up some time in 1970s. What happens when you get a paper typewritten - you make mistakes “typos”. The secretaries do not like that because they had to white out the typos.

Hellrigel:

Yes, you had to use white-out, retype the whole page, or cut-and-past. During high school and college, I used a special erasable paper. You could erase typing with a pencil eraser and retype. I also had a white-out ribbon cartridge for my electric typewriter.

Atal:

I often made mistakes in writing equations. Sometime in the 1970s, I was fighting a timeline, and I have to send the paper within the week. If I went to my secretary, she would have gotten mad. The blue, yellow, pink, and white, whatever it is they used to call all these things. Well, I did not know what to do, so I called Doug McIlroy, who was the head of the Computing Techniques Research Department at Bell Labs. I said to him, I have a problem, I want some computer program to prepare my paper. He said, we are working on this and his colleague, Joe Ossanna [Joseph Frank Ossanna, Jr.] was writing a program which will do that formatting. The program name was troff, but the first version of troff had no equation builder. Well, immediately Doug McIlroy called Joe Ossanna and said, well, can you create troff “macros” for equations. No problem! He [Ossanna] wrote a number of macros. All the equations came in the right place in the text justified and where they were mentioned (sounds magic!).

Hellrigel:

They get set in the text.

Atal:

Yes. Yes. That was the early stages of typesetting. Bell Labs Computing had just purchased a phototypesetter. He [Ossanna] did a lot of work. He worked for two days and produced a program which produced a final paper for me. He put it through the Bell Labs phototypesetting machine, and I got a paper completely in printed form, just like you get from a book. I sent the paper within the time limit. In this kind of way of working together, going out of their way to help is Bell Labs, this kind of feeling was everywhere. I do not remember all the names, but people were absolutely helpful.

Hellrigel:

I guess you had some secretaries that you worked with a lot over the years that were the people you went to when you needed projects written up, typed and photocopied.

Atal:

Yes, we had wonderful secretaries, and very capable indeed. There are no secretaries now, but in the old days we depended on secretaries. Their job was tough, working on a typewriter and correcting mistakes with whiting, and taking dictation.

Hellrigel:

Did women work in the lab when you were at Bell Labs?

Atal:

In the very beginning, very few women because when I joined in 1961, they thought women were good only for the role of a secretary, mail girl or a Xerox operator and all this.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Yes. Secretarial support.

Atal:

Secretarial and all this. I do not think there were many women working as a member of the technical staff (MTS) in the research area. It took a long time for this country to regard women as capable human beings. Now it is coming. But affirmative action might have done that partly.

Hellrigel:

Yes. The law. When the law changed, they had to change a bit and employ women.

Atal:

Yes. It might have brought change. I had a very good experience. When I was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, I went to Washington. Now, there were a lot of great people there, and here I was a new person. I did not know how to behave, how to talk, how to do anything. I met there …. And I remember the name Dresselhaus.

Hellrigel:

Oh Mildred, Mildred Dresselhaus.

Atal:

Yes, Mildred Dresselhaus.

Hellrigel:

Fabulous person and the first woman to receive the IEEE Medal of Honor (2015).

Atal:

Oh, she helped me so much, not only that year, but for a couple of years so that I felt comfortable. She was absolutely wonderful.

Hellrigel:

She helped you with the conferences?

Atal:

Not conferences. Getting into the organization. You know, you come from outside. Famous people are there, and you feel almost taken by complexity.

Hellrigel:

She took you under her wing.

Atal:

Right. She was so helpful.

Hellrigel:

There's a biography on her now called Carbon Queen. I have not read it yet.

Atal:

Yes. She has done fabulous work. Women are different. Different in what they bring to the world. We should take advantage of that.

Hellrigel:

The IEEE Board of Directors has a new permanent committee on diversity chaired by Andrea Goldsmith, the Dean of Engineering at Princeton University.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

There is much hope for diversity initiatives at IEEE as the organization tries to be more inclusive for both members and staff. It is the IEEE Committee on Diversity and Inclusion. First it was an ad hoc committee, but in November 2021 it became a permanent committee.

Atal:

I think we need some courses to teach about women.

Hellrigel:

I have one brother and two sisters. In the USA and western society, girls were always raised with the expectation that they are the caretakers, and they help people. The boys were supposed to be rugged and more independent. It is not that the boys are incapable of being caretakes, they were not expected to take that role. It just they were not raised that way. Now, these are the stereotypes, but they are socially constructed.

Atal:

Yes. That is right. This is kind of a systematic bias built over centuries. The net effect of this I think is very unpleasant.

Hellrigel:

You have two daughters. Did any of them become physicists or engineers?

Atal:

No, my elder daughter, Alka became a doctor.

Hellrigel:

A medical doctor?

Atal:

Yes. She is practicing here at Everett Clinic in Everett, Washington. My other daughter, Namita, said I will not work because my responsibility is at home to bring up the children and I respect that. In fact, that is very proper.

Hellrigel:

It is a choice.

Atal:

Right. She has two children. She brought the family up and she feels that is her accomplishment, and that is correct.

Hellrigel:

Right. Everybody should have a choice, and if they are financially secure, they will be able to exercise the option to leave employment and raise the family.

Both of your children graduated college?

Atal:

Yes. My younger daughter went to college at Washington University.

Hellrigel:

In St. Louis?

Atal:

Yes, and my elder daughter went to Stanford.

Hellrigel:

Stanford University, okay. I did some of my dissertation research at the Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York.

I earned my Ph.D. at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio and I have a good friend at the University of Rochester. The Rush Rhees Library has an extensive collection of late nineteenth and early twentieth century journals.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

It is an excellent library.

Atal:

I used to visit Rochester quite often when my daughter was studying there. It was a good, good university.

IEEE Recognitions

Hellrigel:

IEEE has been a big part of your career. When you became an IEEE Fellow, how did you hear about that?

Atal:

Good question. I will tell you, I do not like all these honors.

Hellrigel:

You have quite a few of them.

Atal:

It is a question that comes all the time. In everything I did a little work, and a lot of other people did work became famous, but credit goes to me. But it is our work. This question often comes up and people ask at meetings and all that. Only one person got the recognition, but so many people did the work, so I do not know what to do about it.

Hellrigel:

It is like winning the Oscar because the production of a movie takes so many people with a variety of skills. Yes, there are ensemble awards, but most awards go to a single person, like the best actor award.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Where were you when you found out you were nominated to be an IEEE Fellow and then when you were elected an IEEE Fellow? Today, most people say they received an email. Previously, I guess, they received either a letter in the mail or maybe a phone call. Do you recall receiving a phone call, an e-mail, or a letter?

Atal:

Most probably a letter. I do not remember now. I remember when I got the award at the Franklin Institute, the Vice-President of the Institute called me and told that you are going to receive the Benjamin Franklin Medal [2003]. The Franklin medal is a well-known medal and a lot of important people have got it. You feel good. There's no question that as a human being you feel good that you have been recognized, but a lot of people work in this world beside you, and they do not get recognized at all. We do not know how to do it. We do not have any proper way to recognize so many people. Take the cellphone. Certainly, I produced the basic idea and wrote the first paper, which brought this idea out in the open, but many people worked to make it a reality.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Atal:

I do not know. This is a human problem. I do not know the answer to this. People like awards actually.

Hellrigel:

Organizations like awards. IEEE has the Medal of Honor which started as the IRE’s top award. Before the merger and the creation of IEEE, the AIEE had the Edison Medal as its top award.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

In 1963, the newly created IEEE decided that it was going to recognize the IRE's medal as its highest award, so today, the IEEE Medal of Honor is IEEE’s highest award. As a historian, I feel compelled to tell the complete story. I said, I cannot really let you do that without acknowledging that between 1909 and 1962, AIEE’s highest award was the Edison Medal. IEEE really needs to have an asterisk to denote that before the merger in 1963 and the creation of IEEE the Edison Medal was the top AIEE award. You cannot strike out or misrepresent history and say all those people awarded the Edison Medal by the AIEE are less than those who earned the IRE’s Medal of Honor. Both organizations had their top awards, one called the AIEE Edison Medal, and one called the IRE Medal of Honor. This is the story I share in an exhibit at the IEEE Operations Center in Piscataway, New Jersey. Over the years, some medals and awards have been discontinued due to sponsorship, changing fields, etc.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

That is a challenge. I've never been to the IEEE award ceremony. I've been with IEEE since January 2016, so that is almost seven years. In January 2023, I will start my eighth year at the IEEE History Center.

Atal:

Yes, I have very much enjoyed the various IEEE award ceremonies. In some sense, I learn about other people. I learn about the other countries they come from. It makes me feel good that these are the people who have done the work and to see them. I think the ceremonies are good.

Hellrigel:

The IEEE Foundation staff is getting back from, San Diego and I look forward to the small vignettes they record with the IEEE major medal recipients. We should not say winners because it implies there are losers. Friends in the IEEE Awards office explained that the preferred word choice is recipient, not winner because using the word winner implies the others are losers. We have some really cool photographs of some early award ceremonies and fancy dinners, and it is delightful to see the members in their tuxedos and the ladies in their gowns. It makes it look like the Academy awards of Engineering geekdom. It has been challenging to have the IEEE Awards events virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been recording oral histories via WebEx. Before the COVID pandemic I usually went to see people at conferences, the IEEE office, or their home, and recorded in person, so I have a small digital camera and a tripod that sits behind me. The interviewee sat on the other side of the table, I aimed the camera at them, and I sat off camera. Since we have been using WebEx and Zoom for a while, I think people are a little bit more relaxed. They do not seem to mind recording virtually and we can take breaks.

Atal:

Yes. I think Zoom and WebEx are now getting very common, and they are important. In this COVID time, they're essential, I think.

Hellrigel:

Yes. I have some questions about IEEE. Then, I know I've kept you for a long time and I do not want to wear you out, so we should take a break. It may be past your lunchtime. Are there any big conferences you used to go to? Any favorite conferences you attended?

Atal:

I've been to many, but I think big conferences are not in my liking.

Hellrigel:

You found the smaller conferences more enjoyable?

Atal:

I do not like very big conferences. I got kind of tuned into the signal processing conferences and I got to know a lot of the people. A conference where I do not know many people, it is kind of a boring conference.

Hellrigel:

Exactly.

Atal:

Yes. The signal processing area of IEEE was small once upon a time. But it has become a major activity. I did not mention that when I came to Bell Labs, signal processing name was not there. The society [IEEE Signal Processing Society] is a very good society. It produces journals which I often read. It produces a lot of good things, and the meetings are very good. Since the 1970s, I have attended most of the meetings of the [IEEE] Signal Processing Society. Its name might have changed.

Hellrigel:

Right, IEEE societies sometimes change their names. For example, the IEEE Power Engineering Society is now the Power and Energy Society, and its membership has increased. In terms of membership, the IEEE Computer Society is the largest society. At one time, you were the editor of an IEEE Signal Processing Society journal.

Atal:

Only the Acoustical Society Journal. Not an IEEE journal. I do not think I edited any IEEE journal. I've been reviewer of IEEE papers.

Hellrigel:

Did you enjoy that?

Atal:

Yes. I still do this to keep up, but I do not know how long I will continue.

It takes a lot of time because fields are changing, and because sometimes I feel there is so much change from my days when I used to do research. The fields have advanced quite a bit. For example, these days we have a lot of videos. Video has increased and people would want then to edit videos by speakers.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes.

Atal:

There are discussions going on. A lot of people are there. You want the automatic program to separate all this out.

Hellrigel:

Well, and for my purposes [to produce an oral history transcript], AI is not up to the best it can be. The IEEE History Center hires a transcription company that uses humans to produce the transcript as a Word document.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I've tried using the automatic transcription function in WebEx. When I was practicing for an oral history training webinar, I introduced myself and said that I work for IEEE. It had me living in Tripoli. No matter how I enunciated the phrase, the text kept stating that I am in Tripoli. Sometimes IEEE Signal Processing Society members and other IEEE members ask why I do not use AI software to prepare the oral history transcripts, and I have to tell them my experiences as I just mentioned. Other people in the AI and signal processing fields admit the software is not quite there for my needs.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I've tried it a few times, and it takes more time to debug that transcript than it does to edit a human-generated transcript

Atal:

That is quite possible because these are areas that are still in their infancy.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Technical terms, different names of people, and then different accents are difficult for the software.

Atal:

Yes, I understand. These are very, very new areas, and it would take a while.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Atal:

I have one question which I am trying to understand. I am looking at the pictures of you and me. I find my face is looking down although I am looking straight here.

Hellrigel:

Oh, I do not know. I have my computer sitting on five books to adjust the height and camera.

Atal:

Oh, five books.

Hellrigel:

Yes. My camera is right above here.

Atal:

Oh, so the camera, it must be here at this mark?

Hellrigel:

Right, right. So, you're looking at it. You are level with it.

Atal:

Camera is here, right. Camera is here and camera is coming here.

Hellrigel:

Yes. I jack mine up so that it is almost a little bit above my eyelevel. I use the computer’s internal camera, not an external camera, and I do not have special lights. I try to adjust my framing and maybe I need a higher quality camera. I need to review the computer’s settings, and maybe, WebEx’s settings.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

If I do that, then the young James Watt in the framed lithograph on the wall behind me cannot be seen. It is a reproduction of an 1868 lithograph of James Watt, the steam engine inventor.

Atal:

Oh. I am sitting straight. You see my eyeglasses are here and then go to the center of the screen, but that is how my picture is there. Now I do not know whether WebEx can do anything about it.

Hellrigel:

Well, we’re going to archive the recorded oral history and we might extract little snippets to post with the transcript. Maybe we can edit the image to crop it in a way that looks that you're more head-on. I am not a video editor, so I do not know about modifying the image.

Atal:

Yes. But these photos will not go into the interview, right?

Hellrigel:

Correct. Sometimes we post snippets, but most of the time we only post the written transcript without audiovisual clips.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Since the transcript goes through a light editing process it is not going to match up exactly with the original and complete audiovisual file. We do not edit the recording to match the edited transcript. It is too time consuming, and researchers need the written document for their work.

Atal:

Yes. It is very difficult.

Hellrigel:

If the interviewee wants, we can post select excerpts.

Atal:

Selected portions, you can put in.

Hellrigel:

Yes

Atal:

Yes. It does not add much to the interview to see these faces. The transcript provides the content of what the person said.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Atal:

That is what I enjoy reading in oral history. Now, occasionally, you can show a picture if it adds value somewhere.

Hellrigel:

Right. We do add some minor contextual comments such as laughing in brackets if the person laughs. It marks a person’s emotion [laughing]. The transcriber works from the audio file, not an audiovisual file.

Atal:

Yes, that is okay, and everyone can read it.

Hellrigel:

We save all of this in the original recording. It is preserved in the IEEE Archives. We have recordings going back to the mid-twentieth century.

Atal:

You must have an extremely large disc?

Hellrigel:

The earliest recordings are on tapes. The recordings have been digitized and now we record digitally. All the oral histories are stored on the IEEE servers.

Atal:

I think it is on the mainframe, but that is a storage problem. We have a huge storage everywhere because we store so much. For example, take for Dropbox, the amount of disc space it must be using is extremely large.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes. I keep getting e-mails from Dropbox because people send me documents. Usually, I like an e-mail attachment, but that is the past. Dropbox, Google Doc, or whatever is the present option supported by IEEE IT. Today, our conversation will be a five-hour interview. This will be five hours and WebEx is recording it. Personally, I keep my work backed up first, on thumb drives and then the IEEE server. I like keeping my working documents on the thumb drive because I have access, even when the servers are unavailable. I can also work anywhere such as an airport and I do not have to use unsecure internet networks to access my documents on IEEE servers. When I am not in a secure place, I do not like getting on the internet with my IEEE computer because I do not want someone trying to gain backdoor access into anything.

Atal:

Oh, I see, yes.

Hellrigel:

I am a historian and I keep copies of a lot of projects. I still have 3.5-inch disks as well as 5.25-inch disks from some projects I've worked on in graduate school. The IEEE Archives has some of oral histories recorded on big reel tapes, cassette tapes, and now our recordings are digital. If you ever come to Piscataway, I will give you a tour.

Atal:

Okay. So ultimately, you will transfer all this to some IEEE center of storage?

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Atal:

That must be huge.

Hellrigel:

Yes. We digitized all the oral histories, and they are preserved on IEEE servers. We also have the original format stored in boxes in the IEEE Archives. Every now and then IEEE IT informs the IEEE History Center that we have used up our space and we get more space on the IEEE server.

Atal:

Okay.

Hellrigel:

The oral histories get archived on the server. I get the word document from the transcription company, and I make the first round of edits. Then I will send you the slightly edited transcript for you to edit. The final version is approved by you and posted on ETHW. All copies of each edited version are archived and preserved as part of the IEEE Archives collections.

Atal:

Yes. Yes.

Hellrigel:

After we create the final transcript, we can discuss adding documents to your entry. If necessary, or if you want, we can have an additional meeting. If you want to add more material, you can either write a First-Hand History or provide the documents, photographs, etc. for an appendix to your oral history and biographical entry. The material you sent me will be part of this additional documentation.

Atal:

Use your judgment to kind of supplement because there is more information, which was prepared information.

Hellrigel:

Right. Right. I also found an old CV or pieces of your CV, and I have copies of your patents. I found information about you in the IEEE Fellows Directory, too.

Atal:

Yes, and if you need any information, let me know, because I have it in my computer and some of these small segments, I can send to you if that can add value somewhere. If you need a photograph of mine, I can send the photograph.

I have an example biography I wrote. They become obsolete, so I have one biography which may not be the most complete, but I can give it to you. I can send it to you, and you can use the material wherever you want

Hellrigel:

That would be cool because I am going to make an entry, a biographical entry for you, in ETHW [Engineering and Technology History Wiki]. If you have any papers or what, and then, like the article that that judge wrote that would be great.

Atal:

Yes, that I will send. I remember that, yes.

Hellrigel:

Often, in our oral histories, people do not tell us how they survived interrogation by the law and their experiences with patent litigation. Since you retired, you spent about ten years traveling and you have spent ten to twenty years working at the University of Washington.

Atal:

Yes. Yes, it is a combination. That is what kept me. I said, retirement has become very nice. This is twenty years, but it is not retirement. Retirement is another phase of life, which one has to manage to make it nice.

Hellrigel:

If you were to do your career over again, would you have changed anything?

Atal:

I do not know about that. I think what would have changed is how I deal with other people. I think we still do not pay respect to other people as much as we should. You know, we learn how to deal with people and in that process, we do not care as much for everybody. And I think we can include the caring part. We should regard every human being just like you, and every human being is special. But we put all our feelings of this kind and that kind, and we have an opinion of other people. Everyone is different, but everybody is a human being and a very special entity in this universe.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Sometimes, we get really wrapped up in our own life.

Atal:

I think that we should pay more regard. It is good to talk, but we see the world is more divided now than ever when compared to the 1960s when I came to the United States.

Hellrigel:

Today, there is much division.

Atal:

I really liked those Kennedy days. Now, of course, that is the old times. Maybe I forget many things, but I had a great positive feeling about how Kennedy was running the show at that time.

Hellrigel:

I do not know, some say the new communication technology and instantaneous twenty-four-hour a day news cycle, creates this need for information. But then what is information? What is news?

Atal:

Yes, I think you have a very strong point. I do not know the answer. I find I use all of this quite a bit. Once upon a time, I could not communicate to India. My contact with India and where I grew up in India was very little. Now, it is available. I am connected to India. I can watch the show, but what's the point. I am asking myself, the social media is there, the news media is there, and the twenty-four-hour hour news cycle is there. Is it adding any value? But I am done. No, at this phase of my life I am seeing that I should not get into this kind of mass media activity.

Hellrigel:

Well, yes. Then there'll be some critique of say sports and movie people, the athletes, and actors. Some people say they are role models or should be role models. But who's holding them up as role models. Are they asking to be role models? Why are they considered role models?

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

You could go back to President John F. Kennedy and there were parts of his life that certainly were not role model material, but he did not run around and say that he was a role model.

Atal:

I am sorry, I do not know. You may answer. I'd be listening to each other more or not, or less. That is a review of other people who are saying things. Are we listening properly or just doing our own bandwagon effect?

Hellrigel:

True, true. Sometimes, this might happen in IEEE. For example, many IEEE officers have one year, perhaps two, and they are expected to initiate a new direction, program, or motto. They are trying to move it along, and before you know it, their year ends. In regard to IEEE presidents, there are the Three Ps [president-elect, president, and past president of IEEE] as a means of having some continuity and also share the responsibilities and travel. The president-elect is trained the year before taking the presidency. Then they become president and are looking to make their mark, but their game plan might not support the past president’s plan. After teaching at various universities for thirty-two years, I can say that students have access to sources via a different form such as bound volumes in the library and digitized material via the Internet. In addition, sources may be considered differently. For example, newspapers included articles, editorials, and opinion columns. You learned the difference through current event assignments in grammar school. Today, we have blogs and I have had to tell some students you have to be a critical reader and determine the difference between opinion pieces (often uninformed opinion pieces) and refereed journal articles. I would tell my students to submit their bibliography, list of sources, so we could review them and assess their perspective and merits.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

It might be more informed than others. In the history of technology, we have also had a re-emergence of the prism of nationalism.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Often the debate about who invented a particular invention and who did it first is seen through a prism of nationalism. For example, did Thomas Edison or Joseph Swan invent the incandescent light bulb. Well, they both invented an incandescent lamp, and in the UK, after much wrangling, the interests merged forming a company called Ediswan. They decided, let us stop beating each other up in the courts and merge. In addition, I have presented professional papers in Eastern Europe, and some people said people other than Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan invented the electric light. Yes, there were other inventors and other light bulb designs in the USA and abroad. The perspective of nationalism is sort of re-emerging in history, particularly during the last six months.

Atal:

Going on. Yes, it could be that everything changes. You know, I was not there in 1800, but things have changed since then. I compare things not just in India, but here [the United States] in 1960s, the election process here, the elections were there, but we did not go on fighting elections twenty-four-hours a day - -. Nowadays, we are fighting election all the time.

Hellrigel:

The election season gets longer and longer as they raise more money for commercials.

Atal:

Before that, I think it was distinctly different. Elections have time, process, this over, then you get busy in some other activity and so on and so on. Different political parties were behaving much more differently. I do not know what manner. Things have changed. The world is changing. What can I say?

Hellrigel:

IEEE is reviewing it presidential campaigning process. I do not know, campaigns, for lack of another word, but there's been some review this year. Usually, the last questions I ask include is there something else you wish to talk about and if you have any advice for STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] students and younger IEEE members. Going forward, do you have any advice for IEEE as an organization? You have been a member for decades and an IEEE Fellow since 1982. What did becoming a member around 1980 mean to you?

Atal:

Somewhere very close, but I was not a written member, but I was effectively a member much earlier.

Hellrigel:

Yes, you have been active in IEEE activities since the 1960s.

Atal:

The 1960s, yes. IEEE played a very important role in my life, I hope IEEE will not be just for the older members, the grown-ups or people who have been in IEEE for forty years, but also for the young people who come in. IEEE should look very carefully at whether it is meeting the needs of these young people. There should be some committee to figure out what the role of IEEE, the idea of IEEE, is to people who have just entered graduate school. Ultimately, they will get the degree, and IEEE has all these professional activities. IEEE can take advantage of their knowledge in this area to help people grow up to be proper engineers. One of us cannot do it one by one. We do not know enough, but IEEE has a lot of members that have experiences, and they have seen this thing changing and society is changing. How could IEEE help these young people?

Hellrigel:

Do you have any advice to people considering an engineering or STEM career? Perhaps you have advice you might offer if you were to give a presentation at either an IEEE conference or meeting or another gathering just chatting with people at a happy hour? Some conferences are so large with thousands of attendees, so maybe you would not want to give such a presentation in front of a large crowd. However, you might have a chance to talk to younger members at a small gathering.

Atal:

Big yes.

Hellrigel:

Yes. I do not know how you get the younger ones to come in and feel welcome.

Atal:

Yes. The big conferences are dominated by these big people. Nothing against the big people, but I feel the big people have different needs. They already have grown up and they have matured, but young people. This is what I am familiar with. My own experience is that when I came to this country, I needed help because I was coming from India, and I did not know anything about any meeting or conference and what it is. The in-house workshops were extremely good. Generally, I did not like large meetings because they are overrun by some kind of central gravity of who people are.

The other in-house meetings were absolutely fabulous, and they helped me a lot. I used to attend when the meetings happened, and I learned a lot in conversation and this and that. That shaped me quite a bit. I also enjoyed talking to my friends because they're a smaller meeting. You enjoy talking and discussing and exchanging meals.

Hellrigel:

You found that home in the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Were you ever a member of another IEEE society or an IEEE technical council?

Atal:

Say it again. I do not listen.

Hellrigel:

You've been a long-term member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society?

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Were you ever a member of another IEEE technical council or society?

Atal:

There are several organizations to attend in IEEE. I take interest because they are not signal processing necessarily, but they are equally interesting. I do not remember the name, but as I went through the whole list there is the IEEE Communication Society. I can subscribe to their journal and read their papers because they also come close to my needs, but they are also a special area where I may not fit in. IEEE is a very large organization, and that is good. You point to something very good. You have to figure out what is losing and what is coming. You should kind of encourage those new things coming up because the world is changing.

Involvement in other organizations

Hellrigel:

I guess you're a member of IEEE and the National Academy of Sciences. Have you been active in other organizations?

Atal:

I’ve been active in the Acoustical Society of America. I've also been active in the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. When I was in New Jersey, I used to go to all these meetings almost every year. I am not going to all of those meetings from Seattle. Nowadays, the Zoom meetings are helping. Everybody has to examine how everything fits into the new environment. The old things cannot continue.

Hellrigel:

At this point in your career, you factor in expenses and the time it takes to just travel to a meeting or conference. Then the COIVD-19 pandemic ended in person meetings for some time and as you mentioned virtual meetings because an alternative. After COVID, do you think you will hop on the plane and go to a conference in person?

Atal:

No. I think age probably affects the behavior. I have been working with Prof. Fan-Gang Zeng at the Center for Hearing research, UC Irvine [the University of California, Irvine] for the past several years. I used to go there once a year, talk to students, and spend a whole day. It was kind of a routine then, but after the Zoom COVID, now, I take part in meetings virtually every week. They have department meetings where they get a lecturer and if the subject is of interest, I attend the meeting through Zoom. This is how I kind of keep being part of everything without running around. With age, running around is becoming a little more difficult for me.

As I am growing old, the routine is changing, but I still want to be part of the technical environment. I am part of it, and I learn new things. IEEE also has the same thing. IEEE is a means for learning new things, what's happening in the world.

Hellrigel:

The past two years I have been dealing with the young professionals group. Region 6 has the Rising Stars Conference in Las Vegas in early January. I've worked with them via Zoom for two years, making presentations virtually. This year [January 2023] I might go in person. I heard the annual Consumer Electronics conference will be in Las Vegas afterwards and I've never seen that meeting.

Atal:

No, I see. Yes, yes.

Hellrigel:

Region 6 people told me the Consumer Electronics convention is worth seeing.

Atal:

Okay. There are a lot more meetings these days than ever. Compared to the 1960s, I just put a reference point there, meetings have multiplied.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes.

Atal:

They cost money and time. That is what every professional has to figure out how to use his time creating. He is supposed to be a professional member. How does he create knowledge? How does he discharge responsibilities and so on and so on? Everybody has to examine how we make work better, including IEEE.

Hellrigel:

IEEE has realized that during the COVID-19 pandemic. When they, I think the word is “pivoted” to manage staff and activities they had to think differently. When they pivoted to online Zoom and WebEx, I heard that attendance has gone up and revenue was still really good. Now there's a move, a shift from all virtual toward a hybrid mode for work and meetings as the peak of the pandemic wanes. For now, some meetings and conferences may remain all virtual because travel is still problematic.

Atal:

Yes. I never knew about Zoom. I am an ignorant person. I was not attending the meetings of the National Academy of Sciences in the beginning. Then I found the National Academy of Sciences is more in tune with my interests because the National Academy of Engineering is a little more management type people. I started attending meetings by Zoom and I started doing committee meetings by Zoom. I get the same value without going. This is a fundamental change. Of course, people may like to meet personally. That is a different angle. Right now, people can do both; go to meetings now and then go to Zoom meetings more often. I do not know.

Hellrigel:

In addition, for less formal meetings, and if I do not have to record the meeting, I started using Google Meet. I will use it in lieu of a phone call.

Atal:

I have used them. We use Google Meet for family gatherings, and we use Zoom also for family gatherings. They work out very well. I mentioned that before 2019 I was not aware of Zoom because we had talked about the videos meetings since the picture phone came in. Zoom did not play any role. All the meetings were personal. We traveled by car or by plane and meetings have increased. The meetings were very few in very old days, but meetings have increased tremendously.

Hellrigel:

As you pointed out, it is very important for diversity. We can get people around the globe, we can get people of different ages and different capabilities, and you do not have to feel like you have to trek to a conference.

Atal:

By my examination, I find we have more meetings, and it is the same thing with India. There are a lot of conferences, meetings, and shows here and there, but we are not listening to others. We should spend more time listening; it is very important. Like you see that this Ukraine war is going on and it is a complicated situation. I am not an expert in that area. Now, I used to listen to the views of people who have experiences in that area. A number of people have their own angle to kind of push here.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Atal:

But I love to hear, and it is not that I agree with him, the views of Mr. Henry Kissinger. Now, he is close to 100 [years old], so he's old and he does not come out on TV very often. But yesterday, I found his interview in the Financial Times.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes.

Atal:

He has a different view, which I may not agree with, and I may not understand, but he has a view and tremendous experience. I enjoy these kinds of things. I do not want to hear my views. I do not learn anything if someone says what I say, but different people say different things, and then I can think of the alternative angle.

Hellrigel:

Yes. I've listened to a few interviews and programs by the late Secretary of State Madeline Albright.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Before she passed away, she would be on political talk shows and C-SPAN. As a historian and history professor, I find her talks interesting, especially her wartime and diplomatic experiences, [both World War II and the Cold War]. I believe [Mikhail] Gorbachev is still alive, but now he probably could not speak freely.

Atal:

They will not let him speak. Yes, this is a complicated world. A lot of people do not say in public what they think.

Hellrigel:

I remember I was in graduate school when the Berlin wall came down.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I was watching it on my little black and white TV in 1989. I still had a little black and white GE TV and that is what I watched alone in my room. Most everybody in the dorm on my floor was out in the lounge watching television. The feeling was just who would have thought that this would happen? And now to see what's happening, what's that thirty-three years later, it is unsettling. As a global institution, IEEE has to deal with some of these things. As far as doing business with Russia, that is probably on hold because you cannot transfer money according to U.S. policy and U.S. State Department guidelines.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I remember hearing that there were sanctions or restrictions prohibiting business and interaction with some countries such as Iran and Iraq which prohibited shipping journals into those countries. You cannot do business with some countries even though IEEE may see itself, I do not know, politically neutral or apolitical. I do not know. But you cannot avoid the situation. I mean, certainly there probably will be no conferences because the U.S. State Department says no business, so that means no conferences in Russia.

Atal:

Yes, this will take a long time to reset everything because we have a broken system now. A broken system means broken communication, and that is dangerous.

Hellrigel:

Right, broken communication and misinformation, too. I wonder if advanced technology will be used for encrypted talk and communication. It is not my field, but I guess once you've encrypted it, the next person is coming up with the technology to unencrypt it or break the encryption, decode the encryption. Like the World War II stories of code breakers.

Atal:

Well, this is a very difficult area because if quantum computing comes in, it will change the nature of encryption, generally. A search technique and searching very large things will be different in quantum systems because they can search very large data.

Hellrigel:

Right, and just crunch it until they can break it.

Atal:

Well, the speed goes up, then they will break it. But then, people are working on a system which will be run very on different principles. That is how progress is being made and work will continue. But it is tied up with the larger area of internet security.

Hellrigel:

True.

Atal:

The Internet was not designed for all these things we are doing. In 1971 or 1972, I remember definitely, we were thinking of just exchanging papers.

Hellrigel:

Exactly.

Atal:

Now, it is serving another purpose and it has not changed the structure. We have added up all these little, little angles there. It is highly insecure and that can open other Pandora boxes and then on top of that, cyber security. No. Does IEEE have a journal cyber security?

Hellrigel:

I believe they have related publications, journals and magazines, and conferences, too. I do not recall specific titles.

Atal:

I will look at that.

Hellrigel:

Internet security is a big issue at work. At the IEEE Operations Center in Piscataway, we have posters all over the place warning us not to open e-mail attachments and strange emails because your computer and the IEEE system can get hacked. The IEEE History Center was based at Stevens Institute of Technology for about four or five years, and during the COVID-19 pandemic we moved to the IEEE Piscataway office. When we were at Stevens, a few years ago, the university got hacked, in August just as the fall semester was starting. These cyber criminals knew what they were doing because they busted into university systems just as they were getting ready for the fall semester. People were paying their dorm and college tuition fees and classes were going to start. The criminals broke into the systems, and they froze them, seeking a large sum of money. They were looking for a bounty or ransom to unfreeze them. Yes, I believe Stevens got busted via an opened email and accessing a link via an attachment. I do not remember if it was a “worm” or whatever you call those programs that hijack a computer system.

Atal:

Yes. I think all this is how the world changes. I was just looking back, and we thought the twentieth century was an interesting century. The nineteenth century was different, and the eighteenth century was different. I did not live then, so I do not know. This twenty-first is already twenty years only. In fact, the one reading which I am doing very thoroughly is history of America in more detail because I never learned American history, US history. I learned Indian history. When I started reading, I said, well, I cannot read all the American history, it is too long, so I started reading from the year 1900 onwards. How things happened is very interesting. The twenty-first century will be very different.

Hellrigel:

There's a novel that Edward Bellamy wrote in 1887 called Looking Backward.

Atal:

Oh, I see. I think that is interesting.

Hellrigel:

In this novel, Bellamy talked about a world where there would be no need for cash because people were going to have a card that they would use, so cash, coin and paper currency would become a thing of the past.

Atal:

Well, that is a different area coming up now. I do not know whether IEEE has to have another technical area. It belongs to the IEEE because in its name you have electrical and electronic engineer. Now what’s coming up is something people call blockchain. When you mentioned cash, I think the way I paid you is going to change. Right now, we pay by many means, which are all known, but they're all becoming irrelevant.

Hellrigel:

When Bellamy was developing this novel, he did not think of an electronic thing, but it was electrical. They had the telegraph, telephone, and electric light at this point, but they did not think about anybody stealing your data with those chip scanner things. Today, when you go to pay, there can be a device that steals your info and then hijacks your account. I've used that Bellamy novel in my college courses as assigned reading, gosh, starting more than thirty years ago. At that point, people had credit cards, but the idea of a cashless economy was not common. In time, the whole notion of a debit card was so real, but people still used cash. Now it is very different.

Atal:

My feeling is that in the next fifty years, this will all change in a form which I cannot recognize. People are thinking and they are thinking of new people because their way of looking at everything is different from mine.

Hellrigel:

It is interesting. I look at my young nieces and nephews and the technology. One time, my youngest niece was at a hotel, and she said mommy, mommy what's that? It was a telephone on the nightstand. She had only seen and used cordless phones and cellphones.

Atal:

That is interesting. This telephone is a superfluous entity now sitting everywhere. Now, why it is called the iPhone does not matter, but it is a new phenomenon. It is not good to call it the phone. We have a gadget, it is a new name now, and it can do phenomenal things.

Hellrigel:

Yes, it can. I still miss my slide phone. My slide cell phone was great for texting.

Atal:

Well, all these things came in. I think it is Steve Jobs, in 2006, when he put in his phone, it changed everything. It might still change again. I do not know how.

Hellrigel:

I still have a digital camera, but my telephone takes better pictures now.

Atal:

I think that is true.

Hellrigel:

Going forward, we probably will continue to do oral histories via WebEx because it is more user-friendly since we can do it any time of the day. I do not have to worry about either somebody borrowing my camera at the office or it not working. I do not have to worry about going to a conference where it is very expensive to commute, stay in the hotel, and pay additional expenses. I've started to use a suite at conferences so that I have one room to live in and one room to work in. I set up the equipment and I do not have to keep setting it up and testing it multiple times. Then I schedule eight to ten people to record an oral history at a conference, provided there is no scheduling conflict, cancellations, or other problems. However, that is a brutal schedule; but I want to be cost effective.

I digress. Are there any topics we did not cover, sir?

Atal:

I think we covered a lot. There are always topics we did not cover, but we covered a lot. Somewhere not within the domain of what I was thinking new topics came in, but I think I am kind of doing it sequentially. I think we covered the whole thing from my young days to the present, and I think it really did a good job.

Hellrigel:

We jumped around a bit, but that is how conversations go.

Atal:

I can pass on some written material if I find something which we do not have. If I see a picture which makes some sense, you may include that picture in the transcript.

Hellrigel:

I will send this out and this is a long one, so it will take time to process. I have a backlog of oral histories as well as other projects to work on, too. When I get the raw unedited version, I can share it with you.

Atal:

It is okay. It is all right.

Hellrigel:

Then we can see what you think of it and go from there.

Atal:

Maybe it is good, I think. You see, I enjoyed reading a lot of things. Although I knew Manfred Schroeder, when I read his oral history, I learned a lot of things from his transcript.

Hellrigel:

I have to look him up. It must be fun to read about other people thinking that you were a nice talent to secure for Bell Labs.

Atal:

You learn because you see what happens in part of Schroeder's life. I was not there seeing how things were going in Germany and what he did. I had only a partial knowledge of his life. These interviews kind of make it more complete. The same thing with John Pierce.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Atal:

Yes. My feeling is young people can read. I do not know whether they read it or not, but they can read and see in a whole lifetime how many things happened of different varieties and same thing would happen to these people lives. They got to think through what impact they will have on what they do and what they do not do. They're thinking.

Hellrigel:

I tell them in retrospect, everybody's life is nice and linear. Your life day to day is a challenge. It is more of a roller coaster than a smooth linear progression.

Atal:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Finding out what makes people tick, their family background, and things like that are kind of fun. They can read and acknowledge that people had choices. If you've made a choice and it does not work out, you retool and come back at it at another angle. For example, you found out you did not like management that much, so you retooled and came back at it at another angle.

Atal:

Yes. Right. It is funny. You asked this question before. If I had to redesign my life, I will take the management out of it completely because that is not my expertise.

Hellrigel:

Many people say that.

Atal:

Dealing with people—some people are very good at managing people because they enhance their careers, not their career, but other people’s careers. It does not help them. Now, I am not that kind. So, I accepted that because at that time I felt good to have a title and be called the department head. Oh, I had people to report to and all this kind of thing where I - - ultimately, I do not think so. That is why some university professors, continue with only research.

Hellrigel:

Right. Right, and yes, who wants to be the department chair of people who are not working well together or who do not respect each other.

Atal:

But most people like titles. That is all I know.

Hellrigel:

True. Yes, they like titles and look at people that way.

Atal:

Yes, it is a kind of a lack of our own ability to recognize ourselves. We want to be recognized by others. We want to be complimented, we want to see the title, but we do not appreciate what we are.

Hellrigel:

True. Sometimes, getting that new title is not your forte or really what you're most comfortable in, and then sometimes, it is. But it is nice to notice in yourself where you need to re-navigate.

Atal:

You learn this by living your life. I did not learn that earlier. This I learned by living life.

Hellrigel:

Well, and nobody probably talked about it. If they did, maybe people dismissed them and said, oh, so-and-so is just grouchy; they do not like their job. Management is a big difference from doing research. Okay. I appreciate your time, sir, and I will be in touch with you as soon as possible.

Atal:

Okay. Thank you very much Mary Ann for doing this interview. I am not sure how it will go, but I think we have covered most of it.

Hellrigel:

Thank you. This is wonderful.

Atal:

I will supplement it with some written material, which I may find.

Hellrigel:

That would be fantastic.

Atal:

It may be somewhere. I will pass it on to you, and you can include that at the right place.

Hellrigel:

Okay. We can attach documents as supplemental material and draft either a First-Hand History or an expanded biographical entry in ETHW. However, the transcript will be only “lightly” edited, and you cannot add substantial material directly into the transcript.

Atal:

Yes. The whole story is part of a communication process and we have done a good job of communicating my life and as an IEEE member, so that is very good.

Hellrigel:

I really appreciate your time and I hope you have a good evening. Have a nice cup of tea and relax.

Atal:

Thank you. Yes.

Hellrigel:

Thank you, sir.

Atal:

Thank you very much.

Hellrigel:

Take care. Bye-bye.

Atal:

Bye.