Meet an IEEE Life Fellow and Help Collect IEEE Member History
Article by Tom Coughlin, IEEE Life Fellow
The IEEE New Initiatives Committee (NIC) approved funding an effort for IEEE volunteers to interview IEEE Life Fellows to collect their histories for the IEEE History Committee. I was on the NIC when this was approved and signed up to be one of the interviewers for this effort. To date I have conducted two of these interviews and found them to be very interesting and also it gave me a chance to find out more about the outstanding people I interviewed.
In late October 2021 I interviewed my long-time friend and colleague, Joseph Decuir. There were two interview sessions with Joe, you can see the entire first interview, where this image was captured on ieee.tv at: https://ieeetv.ieee.org/speaker/joseph-decuir
Joseph and I did a lot of work together in the IEEE Consumer Technology Society over several years (including being on the board of governors together, and both of us have been distinguished lecturers for the CTSoc). I also knew Joe from various IEEE Region 6 activities and events.
Joe worked at Atari and helped develop some of the early commercial video game machines. While at Atari Joe worked with Nolan Bushnell and met other active Silicon Valley Engineers at the time, such as Steve Wozniak. He was nominated as an IEEE fellow in 2015 for contributions to computer graphics and video games. Joe went on to make substantial technical and editorial contributions to wired and wireless communications engineering standards.
The History Committee initiative wants to interview as many IEEE Life Fellows as possible, creating a record of their life and accomplishments. If you want to participate, they can train you in how to do the interviews, provide a script to go through in the interview, and then review the results of the interview afterwards. I highly recommend doing this, it is a great way to get to know someone who did some really interesting work and learn about how they got to where they are.
If you are interested in participating in these interviews, please contact Mary Ann Hellrigel at [email protected] to see how you can contribute to this worthy effort.
