Dr. Weinstein (Steve) is a communications engineer with 45 years experience in research, research management, professional activities, and industry applications. His expertise and interests include broadband access networks, optical/wireless integration, public access wireless LANs, physical-level data communication, networking technologies and protocols, and multimedia systems and applications. I invented the echo cancellation technique used in voiceband modems and pioneered use of the Fast Fourier Transform for DMT/OFDM modulation. The Eduard Rhein Foundation (Germany) presented its 2006 Basic Research Award to Steve for that early work on OFDM. During a period of employment at the American Express Company, He invented a smart card security mechanism. A colleague and Steve deployed a WiFi-based audio/video session multicasting and Internet access system for the IEEE NOMS 2000 conference in Honolulu that illustrated the potential for remote conference attendance and multimedia-enhanced conferences. His wife (Judith) and him were responsible for the early (July, 1993) connection of the Morris County, NJ library system to the Internet, preceded in the U.S. only by the Seattle library system.
More broadly, Steve is a technical consultant to major law firms and industry companies on patent litigation and research organization issues; a technical writer; and active in professional activities. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, Vice-Chair of the IEEE Awards Board and Chair of the Awards Policies and Procedures Committee of the Awards Board. Within the IEEE Communications Society, where he is currently Chair of the Strategic Planning Committee, he was the Editor in Chief responsible for early development of IEEE Communications Magazine and later, as Director of Publications, for launching new journals including the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. Steve developed relationships with Sister Societies around the world during his 1996-97 term as President and in 2002-2003 represented the 50,000 members of the Society on the IEEE Board of Directors. He was founding Editor in Chief of the Journal of Communications and Networks (JCN) published by the Korean Institute of Communications Sciences with the technical cosponsorship of the IEEE Communications Society, and an Honorary Member of the Russian A.S. Popov Radio Engineering and Electronics Society. He was a co-founder of the IEEE P1520 Working Group on Network Programming Interfaces. Active in many conferences, I was Program Chair for IEEE WCNC (Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, Atlanta, March 2004) and co-Program Chair of the IEEE CAS/COM International Conference on Circuits and Systems for Communications (Shanghai, May 26-28, 2008).
In 2002-2005 Steve taught several graduate-level EE courses at Columbia University, to both technical and non-technical (primarily School of Journalism) students, the last a new course on "Integrated Networking" describing the fundamental technologies and interworking of diverse wired and wireless networks. He collaborated with faculty colleagues at Columbia and other universities on preparation of NSF proposals. His light technical book, The Multimedia Internet, describing the range of networking, media compression, Internet services and streaming techniques required for adequate quality of service, was published by Springer in 2005. His co-authored Passive Optical Networks Handbook, an introductory overview of passive optical networks technologies and standards, is about to be published by IEEE and Wiley.