Ph.D., MIT, 1967   Specialization: Information and Coding Theory
Thesis Title: Encoding Independent Sample Information Sources

Contact Information:

Office Hours:  Monday and Wednesday 10AM-12Noon, and by appointment
 

Fall 1999 Course:  ENEE204: Basic Circuit Theory

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

 Dr. Pinkston received the BSE degree with highest honors
from Princeton University in 1964, and the PhD degree from MIT
in 1967, both in Electrical Engineering.   His graduate work concentrated
in the area of Information Theory and Coding Theory.  His thesis
was on the theory of representing
outputs of information sources
using the minimum number of symbols
while still maintaining a
specified fidelity. The thesis was
entitled "Encoding Independent
Sample Information Sources.

 He came to UMBC in September of
1997, following a career
in government and industrial research,
which included serving as
the chief of the Research Office for a
major Defense Department
Agency, and for a 7 year period in the
1980's in the private sector
as vice president and chief scientist for
the Microelectronics and
Computer Technology Corp (MCC), a cooperative research venture owned by approximately 20 U.S. computer and electronics companies.
 
 
 

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Information Security

 All aspects of this area, including
cryptology and computer
security.
 

Signal Processing

 Presently working on the problem of
determining the required
number of bits of analog to digital
resolution needed to permit
successful processing of a composite
signal whose components are
very different in amplitude.
 

Quantum Computing and Error
Correction

 This is a relative new field and is
speculative.  According
to quantum theory, physical systems can
exist in superpositions of
states, and operations on these
superpositions  effectively operate
on all of the constituent states in
parallel.  This offers the
possibility of huge parallelism in
computations, but there are
extremely difficult engineering
challenges in implementing a
quantum computer.  One of these is the
fact that the quantum
states can decohere, and errors occur.
Thus error correction
techniques are needed.