Back in March, when I traveled to ICASSP 2010, I was fortunate to assist to Ronald Schafer’s plenary talk. Since then, I have been trying to get a copy of it but I was told to wait for it to be posted on IEEE TV. It took a little longer than what I expected but finally it appeared a few weeks ago:

I think the presentation is excellent. It not only draws from Ron Schafer’s huge experience (see his bio at HP Labs and Wikipedia) and his renown teaching ability, but it also manages to cover a well-balanced presentation of the history of DSP (my favorite part), his view of the future and the technological importance of DSP.

As a small trivia, at around the 15 minutes mark, there is a mention in the video to an early publication describing the discrete-time convolution (is this the first time discrete-time convolution was published?). I was surprised to see in the list of editors (and also contributing authors) for the book the name of Ralph Phillips. This is because he is my great-great-great academic grandfather (I’m interested in my academic genealogy and had been able to trace it way back to the 14th century thanks to the help of the Math Genealogy Project).