Thomas Kailath

Much of the research I have performed has been carried out with some 100 doctoral and postdoctoral scholars over the last four decades and has ranged over many areas of electrical engineering (information and communication theory, statistical signal detection and estimation, linear system theory, control theory, inverse scattering, sensor array processing, VLSI design, and computation) and mathematics (stochastic processes, operator theory, linear algebra, and interpolation theory). I have particularly enjoyed working at the interfaces of these fields, carrying tools and insights across various disciplinary boundaries. My current major interests are in the area of semiconductor manufacturing and in developing fast algorithms for many applications by identifying and exploiting we have called "displacement structure" in the problem. In the first area I have introduced multi-variable system identification and control techniques to generate (essentially) arbitrary temperature profiles across a wafer, a possibility that can significantly increase the yield of thermal processing operations in many fields. So also in optical lithography, concepts of signal processing have been successfully introduced to break the "0.1 um barrier" in optical lithography.