Celebrating IEEE’s Medal of Honor Recipients and Professor Thomas Kailath’s 90th Life Anniversary

Original Description

The Electrical Engineering department hosted a lecture in honor of Professor Thomas Kailath’s 90th life anniversary. Lecture speakers included nine IEEE Medal of Honor recipients: John Hennessy, president emeritus, Stanford; Robert Gallager, professor emeritus, MIT; Thomas Kailath, professor emeritus, Stanford; Dr. Andy Viterbi and Dr. Irwin Jacobs, co-founders, Qualcomm; David Forney, professor, MIT; Brad Parkinson, professor emeritus, Stanford; Dr. Vinton G. Cerf, VP, chief internet evangelist, Google; Dr. Robert Kahn, chairman, CEO, president, CNRI; as well as Martin Hellman, professor emeritus, Stanford, an ACM Turing Award recipient, and Amin Arbabian, professor, Stanford.

This lecture is part of an annual series that was established in honor of Professor Kailath’s 70th birthday, when former students and colleagues came together to recognize his significant influence and contributions by endowing a fund for an annual lecture at Stanford University. The purpose of this lecture series is to promote the importance of mathematics-based fields – such as information theory, communications, computation, control, and signal processing – in tackling complex challenges in engineering and the physical, biological, and social sciences.

The lecture was held on November 11, 2025, in the Mackenzie Room in the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center.

More information: https://kailathlecture.stanford.edu/index.html

0:00 - Welcoming remarks from Professor John Cioffi

2:33 - Dr. Vinton Cerf

32:30 - Professor Martin Hellman

53:55 - Professor Brad Parkinson

58:12 - Professor Robert Gallager

1:02:07 - Professor G. David Forney

1:05:23 - Dr. Robert Kahn

1:09:05 - Dr. Irwin Jacobs

1:13:43 - Panel discussion with John Cioffi, Amin Arbabian, Vinton Cerf, Tom Coughlin, Andrew Viterbi, Mark Horowitz, Martin Hellman

1:57:24 - Thomas Kailath's achievements

2:01:36 - Thomas Kailath

2:23:59 - John Hennessy