John O. Limb

John 0. Limb is an American engineer, known for fundamental contributions to the development of digital video communications and holder of a long series of patent related to computer communications. [ [http://www.patentgenius.com/inventedby/LimbJohnOAtlantaGA.html patentlist] ]

Born in Western Australia he got B.Sc. in electrical engineering (1963) and Ph.D. on the thesis "Vision Oriented Coding of Visual Signal" (1967), both from the University of Western Australia. [ [http://www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/history_center/biography/limb.html biography] from IEEE] Limb studied the human vision's role in the encoding of picture, partially under the direction of Dr. Albert Seyler and Professor Zig Budrikis.

He worked as researcher at the the Postmaster-General's Department's research laboratory in Melbourne (1966-67) before moving to New Jersey where joined Bell Labs (1967), being manager of the department for visual communications research (1971-78) leading to patents. [US patent|4129882] He then led the research department for distributed computer systems (1978-84) before going to Bellcore research where Limb was in charge of developing the new research division for communications sciences (1984-86) where he among other projects, developed medium access control protocols for local area networks. [US Patent|4412326] Later he joined Hewlett Packard as director of laboratories in Bristol, England (1986-89), for the technology analysis group at Cupertino, California (1989) and for the media technology group (1992-94). Distributed Computer Systems Research Department where the emphasis was on office information systems and local/metropolitan area networks. Recently, he has worked on optical communication systems at Broadcom, working at Atlanta, Georgia. [US patent|7245621]

He has held visiting professorships at the Technical University of Hanover (1975), the University of Sydney (1983), and the University of Essex (1985-86). He joined the faculty at the college of computing at Georgia Tech (1994) as "Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Advanced Telecommunications" where he started the "Broadband telecom" center (1995).

Publications

*"Advances in local area networks" (IEEE press, 1987)

Awards

*IEEE Fellow 1978
*IEEE Communications Society L.G. Abraham Award for best paper 1973
*Donald G. Fink Award for the best review paper published in the Proceedings of the IEEE in 1980.
*1991 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, along with C. Chapin Cutler and Arun N. Netravali

References