Richard F. Lyon

Richard F. Lyon
Lyon in 2007
Born
Richard Francis Lyon
1952 (age 73–74)
United States
Alma materCalifornia Institute of TechnologyStanford University
Known for
AwardsIEEE Fellow (2003)Progress Medal of the Royal Photographic Society (2005)ACM Fellow (2010)
Scientific career
FieldsElectrical engineering
InstitutionsXerox PARCSchlumbergerAppleFoveonGoogle
Websitedicklyon.comEdit this at Wikidata

RichardFrancis Lyon (born 1952) is an American inventor, scientist, and engineer. He is one of the two people who independently invented the first optical mouse devices in 1980.[1][2][3] He has worked in signal processing and was a co-founder of Foveon, Inc., a digital camera and image sensor company.

Early life and education

Lyon grew up in El Paso, Texas, as the third of nine children.[4] His father, an engineer for the El Paso Electric Company, brought home an early Fortran programming manual to encourage his family's members to explore their interests in electronics.[5]

Lyon attended Caltech to earn a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, graduating in 1974. While at Caltech, Lyon worked with Carver Mead and John Pierce. He took a summer internship at Bell Labs, where he developed digital signal processing hardware for audio applications.[6] He then enrolled in the graduate program at Stanford University intending to earn a PhD, but left with a master's degree in 1975 to work in Silicon Valley.[5]

Career

Lyon (left) with Steve Kirsch, the other independent inventor of the optical mouse

After Stanford, Lyon worked at Stanford Telecommunications, a small start up company developing signal sets for navigation satellites and Space Shuttle communication systems. During a return visit to Caltech around two and a half years after graduating, he ran into Carver Mead, who was hosting Ivan Sutherland and Bert Sutherland to develop some collaborations between Caltech and Xerox PARC and to develop a computer science department. Lyon joined Xerox PARC in 1977 after interviewing on invitation by Bert Sutherland.[5]

Lyon started working at Xerox PARC with George White under Lynn Conway to build custom microchips for speech processing and digital filtering. Within the year, White left to manage the west coast laboratory of the ITT Defense Communications Division in San Diego, leaving Lyon in charge of the speech recognition project. During this period, he took a course at Stanford on biological information processing and wrote his term paper outlining an approach for speech recognition using a signal processing model of hearing.[7] The paper became the basis for his career in hearing research.[5]

In December 1980, Lyon was one of two people working independently who invented the first optical mouse devices.[2] Lyon's design involved defining screen location using an adaptation of optical lateral inhibition to achieve a wide dynamic range.[8]

Although several people at PARC had filed invention proposals for an optical mouse, none of them had built one or filed a patent for one.[5] A substantially different design was invented at approximately the same time as Lyon's by Steve Kirsch at MIT.

In 1981, Lyon was one of the "Marty randoms" recruited by Jay Martin Tenenbaum to join Schlumberger Palo Alto Research. There, he led the speech recognition project.[5]

In 1988, Lyon moved to the Apple Advanced Technology Group and led the Perception Systems group, where he worked mainly on auditory and sound processing. During this period he published a paper with Carver Mead describing an analog cochlea which modeled the propagation of sound in the inner ear and the conversion of acoustic energy into neural representations.[9][10] The paper received the Best Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 1990 and formed a foundation for later work applying such models to hearing aids, cochlear implants, and other speech recognition hardware devices.[11][12] With Malcolm Slaney, he developed the "cochleagram" representation for visualizing and processing sound for computational auditory scene analysis.[13] With Larry Yaeger, Brandyn Webb, and others, he also developed the handwriting recognition system Inkwell for the Apple Newton.[14][15]

During Apple's period of decline in the late 1990s, over half of the Advanced Technology Group was laid off as part of organizational restructuring, including Lyon and his team.[5] He began working with Carver Mead and Richard B. Merrill to develop digital color photography and co-founded Foveon as a spin-off company from National Semiconductor and Synaptics.[6] At Foveon, Lyon became its chief scientist and vice president of research,[16] and helped develop a three-CCD camera and later the Foveon X3 sensor, which placed three stacked photodiodes onto a single chip – an innovative alternative to the more typical approaches of using either beam splitting with three sensor arrays or a spatial mosaic scheme such as Bayer filter mosaic.[17][18] In 2005, Mead, Lyon, and Merrill received the Progress Medal of the Royal Photographic Society for the Foveon X3 sensor.[19]

In 2006, Lyon returned to corporate research, moving to Google after briefly considering Yahoo. His research at Google has involved managing the camera development for Google Street View and sound recognition for various Google products. Most recently, he taught a course in 2010 at Stanford University and wrote a book, Human and Machine Hearing: Extracting Meaning from Sound, published in 2017.[5][20][21]

Inventions and research

Lyon in 2017 at the Library of Trinity College Dublin's Long Room, posing with Brian Boru's harp.

Awards and recognition

Personal life

Lyon is married to Margaret Asprey; they have two children.[4] He has contributed prolifically to Wikipedia.[38]

References

  1. ^Markoff, John (Feb 21, 1983). "In Focus: The Mouse That Rolled". InfoWorld. Vol. 5, no. 8. InfoWorld Media Group.
  2. ^ abSherr, Sol (Dec 2, 2012). Input Devices. Elsevier Science. p. 221. ISBN 978-0-323-15643-1.
  3. ^DeCarlo, Matthew (Dec 20, 2011). "Xerox PARC: A Brief Nod to the Minds Behind Laser Printing, Ethernet, the GUI and More". TechSpot. Retrieved 2015-04-22.
  4. ^ abAsprey, Margaret Williams (2014). A True Nuclear Family. Trafford Publishing. ISBN 9781490726656. Retrieved 2018-02-04.
  5. ^ abcdefghSteinbach, Günter (Oct 10, 2016). "Oral History of Richard Lyon"(PDF). Computer History Museum.
  6. ^ abGilder, George (2006). The Silicon Eye: Microchip Swashbucklers and the Future of High-Tech Innovation (1st ed.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-32841-7.
  7. ^Lyon, Richard F. (Jul 11, 1978). "A Signal-Processing Model of Hearing"(PDF). Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
  8. ^Kisačanin, Branislav; Gelautz, Margrit (2014). Advances in Embedded Computer Vision. Springer. ISBN 9783319093871.
  9. ^Lyon, R. F.; Mead, C. (1988). "An analog electronic cochlea"(PDF). IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. 36 (7): 1119–1134. doi:10.1109/29.1639.
  10. ^Slaney, Malcolm (1988). "Lyon's Cochlear Model"(PDF). Apple Computer, Inc.
  11. ^"Carver Mead Honors and Awards". California Institute of Technology. Retrieved 2017-10-22.
  12. ^Hamilton, Tara Julia (Feb 6, 2009). "The silicon cochlea: 20 years on"(PDF). The Neuromorphic Engineer. doi:10.2417/1200902.1416. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2016-08-19. Retrieved 2017-10-22.
  13. ^Slaney, Malcolm; Lyon, Richard F. (1993). "On the Importance of Time – A Temporal Representation of Sound"(PDF). In Crawford, M. (ed.). Visual Representations of Speech Signals. New York: John Wiley.
  14. ^Markoff, John (Nov 13, 1995). "Apple Gives Messagepad a Tuneup". The New York Times.
  15. ^ abYaeger, Larry S.; Webb, Brandyn J.; Lyon, Richard F. (Mar 15, 1998). "Combining Neural Networks and Context-Driven Search for Online, Printed Handwriting Recognition in the Newton". AI Magazine. 19 (1): 73. doi:10.1609/aimag.v19i1.1355. ISSN 0738-4602.
  16. ^Lyon, Richard F. (Apr 16, 2004). "DSP 4 You". ACM Queue. Retrieved 2018-06-02.
  17. ^Lyon, Richard F.; Hubel, Paul M. (Aug 21, 2023). "Eyeing the Camera: into the Next Century"(PDF). Foveon.
  18. ^Lyon, Richard F. (Mar 2000). "Prism-Based Color Separation for Professional Digital Photography"(PDF). Proceedings of the Image Processing, Image Quality, Image Capture, Systems Conference: 50–54. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2017-11-07. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
  19. ^"Progress Medal". Royal Photographic Society. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
  20. ^Lyon, Richard F. (May 2, 2017). Human and Machine Hearing: Extracting Meaning from Sound. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1107007536.
  21. ^Moore, Brian C. J. (Aug 2018). "Review of Human and Machine Hearing"(PDF). The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 144 (2). Acoustical Society of America (ASA): 567. doi:10.1121/1.5048422.
  22. ^Lyon, Richard F. (Oct 1981). "The Optical Mouse, and an Architectural Methodology for Smart Digital Sensors", Invited Paper, CMU Conference on VLSI Systems and Computations, Pittsburgh (Kung, Sproull, and Steele, editors), Computer Science Press.
  23. ^U.S. patent 4,521,772: Lyon, "Cursor Control Device", Jun 4, 1985.
  24. ^U.S. patent 4,521,773: Lyon, "Imaging Array", Jun 4, 1985.
  25. ^Richard F. Lyon and James J. Spilker, Jr., "Multisatellite Signal Simulators for the Global Positioning System", National Telecommunications conference, Dallas, Texas, Dec 1976.
  26. ^U.S. patent 4,494,021: Bell, Lyon, and Borriello, "Self-calibrated Clock and Timing Signal Generator for MOS/VLSI Circuitry", Jan 15, 1985.
  27. ^U.S. patent 4,513,427: Borriello, Lyon, and Bell, "Data and Clock Recovery System for Data Communication Controller", Apr 23, 1985.
  28. ^U.S. patent 4,796,227: Lyon and Schediwy, "Computer Memory System", Jan 3, 1989.
  29. ^Sutherland, Ivan; Sproull, Bob; Harris, David (1999). Logical Effort: Designing Fast CMOS Circuits. Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 978-1-55860-557-2.
  30. ^Lyon, Richard F. (May 1982). "A computational model of filtering, detection, and compression in the cochlea". ICASSP '82. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Vol. 7. pp. 1282–1285. doi:10.1109/ICASSP.1982.1171644.
  31. ^U.S. patent 6,078,429: Lyon, "Color Separating Prism Having Violet Light Component in Red Channel", Jun 20, 2000.
  32. ^Other Lyon patents assigned to Foveon
  33. ^"IEEE Fellows for 2003". Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Archived from the original on 2012-08-03.
  34. ^Peters, Mark (Nov 6, 2005). "Royal Photographic Society Award for Foveon sensor".
  35. ^Gilder, George F. (Jan 1, 2005). The Silicon Eye. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 9780393057638.
  36. ^"ACM Names 41 Fellows from World's Leading Institutions – Association for Computing Machinery". ACM. Dec 10, 2010. Archived from the original on 2010-12-10.
  37. ^"SPS Fellows and Award Winners Recognized [Society News]". IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. 35 (2): 7–10. Mar 2018. doi:10.1109/MSP.2018.2789538. S2CID 241847826.
  38. ^"Richard Lyon: Fifteen Eighty Four". Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 2024-02-08.
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