Dr. Evangelos S. Eleftheriou

A 2005 IBM Fellow (the company's most prestigious technical honor), he is head of Storage Technologies at IBM?s Zurich Research Laboratory, Zurich, Switzerland. His pioneering work in recording and communications techniques established new standards of performance in hard disk drive technology. He is most noted for his work on reduced-state sequence detection/decoding in conjunction with noise prediction for magnetic recording and filtered multi-tone modulation techniques for communications systems. His concept of "Noise-Predictive Maximum Likelihood" (NPML) detection has become the core of a new architecture developed for the read channel of hard-disk drives (HDD), and has since become the de facto industry standard. Its deployment in IBM and Hitachi HDD read channels led to an increase of linear density of more than 50% over that of conventional methods. NPML read-channel modules have shipped in server-class, desktop, and mobile HDDs as well as in the Microdrive. He received his Bachelor's degree (5-year program) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece, in 1979, and his M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, in 1981 and 1985, respectively. He joined the IBM Research ? Zurich laboratory in Rueschlikon, Switzerland, as a Research Staff Member in 1986. Since 1998, he has held various management positions and in 2008 was named head of the Storage Technologies Department of IBM Research ? Zurich, which focuses on phase-change memories, scanning-probe techniques and metrology, as well as tape drive technology and solid-state drive technology and systems. He holds over 90 patents (granted and pending applications). He was named a Master Inventor at IBM Research in 1999. He was editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications from 1994 to 1999 in the area of Equalization and Coding. He was Guest Editor of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications special issues, "The Turbo Principle: From Theory to Practice" as well as of the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems special issue on "Dynamics and Control of Micro- and Nano-scale Systems". In 2001, he was elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for the invention of noise-predictive maximum likelihood sequence detection. He was co-recipient of the 2003 IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award in the field of Communications Systems. He was also co-recipient of the 2005 Technology Award of the Eduard Rhein Foundation. In 2005, he was appointed an IBM Fellow and inducted into the IBM Academy of Technology. In 2009, he was co-recipient of the IEEE CSS Control Systems Technology Award and of the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Award. He is a Registered Professional Engineer in Greece and a Fellow of the IEEE. His current research is focused on advanced signal processing, coding, and servo control techniques for improving the reliability and performance of tape systems, as well as for increasing their areal density and storage capacity. With his team he is also currently exploring alternative storage technologies based on nanotechnology. Specifically, these novel storage technologies are atomic force microscopy (AFM)-based probe-storage techniques, better known as "millipede".