Evangelos S. Eleftheriou

Pioneer in recording and communications techniques that established new standards of performance in hard disk drive technology, Eleftheriou has served as head of Storage Technologies at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory, Zurich, Switzerland, and was appointed an IBM Fellow in 2005 — the company's most prestigious technical honor. 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 became the core of a new architecture developed for the read channel of hard-disk drives (HDD), and subsequently became 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 shipped in server-class, desktop, and mobile HDDs as well as in the Microdrive.

Eleftheriou 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. From 1998, he held various management positions, and in 2008 was named head of the Storage Technologies Department of IBM Research—Zurich, which focused on phase-change memories, scanning-probe techniques and metrology, as well as tape drive technology and solid-state drive technology and systems.

He held over 90 patents (granted and pending applications) and was named a Master Inventor at IBM Research in 1999. Eleftheriou has served as editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications from 1994 to 1999 in the area of Equalization and Coding. He has served as 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, and also co-recipient of the 2005 Technology Award of the Eduard Rhein Foundation. In 2005, Eleftheriou 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 research has 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, Eleftheriou has also explored alternative storage technologies based on nanotechnology — specifically, atomic force microscopy (AFM)-based probe-storage techniques, better known as "millipede."