ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

group that came into NASA at that time, myself included, all of them are doing very well, very well, but at the
time, it was an unpopular decision…These kids, they just some sort of diverse, some sort of affi rmative action,
you know, number crunching thing. These guys will never be successful, but everybody from that group, and it
was like 20 or 30 of them, because I know of at least 10 personally. Almost all of us got our Master’s [degree];
some got their Ph.D.s. Some went on to become lawyers. I mean that whole group, it was a very good program,
I mean, NASA should be very, very proud of themselves…I mean all of us had graduated. We had to have at
least a 3.0 from our universities, it was not like they were just, you know, throwing away the Rhodes for us or
anything like that. But we showed to have a lot more initiative and drive than some of the other folks.
Clip 5 - Research During School:
I was looking at a couple of schools, you know, to look at my, for my Ph.D., and I went to decent schools but
I wanted to go to a top tier school, you know, you’ve got to understand I’m always about competition. And
I always need to know where I stack up in the ranks. And so, I was looking at Purdue, Stanford and Georgia
Tech and both of them, all three of those schools had a good history with graduating minorities, you know, but
Stanford graduated the most minority, most minorities and Georgia Tech graduated the most African Americans
with graduate degrees, and most of the minorities at Stanford were Hispanic. So, I decided, that’s how I ended
up picking Georgia Tech, and I went to Georgia Tech, and you know, kind of pretty much on that, you know,
they have a strong school ranking and I was going into digital signal processing and so for those of you who
don’t know what that means, it’s kind of like, it’s just how you take the signals and clean them up and make
them clearer. You know, when you see blurry vision and you focus in, well signal processing is like, is the science
behind that. So how do you clean up signals, and make them more discernible, crisper, sometimes more
audible, so to speak. That’s the whole process behind digital signal processing. And Georgia Tech is number one
in engineering schools in that area, so everyone goes to Georgia Tech to study that.
I also was, I was working in the satellite communication division at NASA, so I had to create a Ph.D. program
that matches signal processing, which was my own interest, with communications and satellite communications
in particular, because NASA was paying, I was on a sabbatical, I won a fellowship to go on the full sabbatical
to pursue my Ph.D. so I had to make it relate to my work when I came back. And so what I did was I looked at
a science that’s called array signal processing and you might, what people call today MIMO technology, you
know, if you go to a Best Buy, and you’ll see MIMO technology which stands for, that’s M-I-M-O, that’s an
acronym, which is multiple input, multiple output. But back in the days when I was working on my Ph.D., it
was called array signal processing, and it’s the same thing, it takes multiple antennaes, you know, you see these
rabbit ears, everyone’s seen the rabbit ears on the top of, you know, the rooftops, but instead of feeding down to
a single point, each individual ear has its own individual connector and you combine them in a way to enhance
the signal in a particular direction without actually having to physically steer it. So that was my Ph.D., was
about taking signal processing coupled with array technology, antennae technology, with satellite communications.
‘Cause I was in the satellite communications deparment, I wanted to use array signal processing, algorithms
and technique that, you know, I was learning at Georgia Tech, and also coupled with the communications
and so when I came out of Old Dominion, I had a signal processing emphasis.
Then I went to Cleveland where I was working for the communications department, so I took all my Master’s
classes in communications and, and so I’m always, I don’t like to lose anything, so I wanted to program my
Ph.D. to encompass all those different aspects. So I took communications, and communications and signal processing
are very closely related, now in the industry. I mean, those are the two hot topics to do a lot of research
and development, ‘cause signal processing enhances communications, communications has applications for
signal processing…and when you think about video cameras, when you think about a picture being blurred, we
talk about, compression techniques, like, you know, things can be compressed and send data across in the compressed
format, you know, you always, zip fi les, zip fi les are that, the same thing, hard drives use the exact same
technology and the same programs, all of these are the same programs. Your CD-ROM, you know, that whole
technology behind CDs and how CDs were, you know, kind of scratch resistant, you know, that you can have a
scratch on a CD and the quality of the music doesn’t go down. That has to do with communications and signal
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