Milestone-Proposal talk:Manchester Code

Advocates’ Checklist

1. Is the proposal for an achievement rather than for a person? Achievement only. If the citation includes a person's name, have the proposers provided the required justification for inclusion of the person's name? No name is included.
2. Was the proposed achievement a significant advance rather than an incremental improvement to an existing technology? Yes.
3. Were there prior or contemporary achievements of a similar nature? There were some. If so, have they been properly considered in the background information and in the citation? Yes.
4. Has the achievement truly led to a functioning, useful, or marketable technology? Yes.
5. Is the proposal adequately supported by significant references (minimum of five) such as patents, contemporary newspaper articles, journal articles, or citations to pages in scholarly books? Absolutely. At least one of the references should be from a peer-reviewed scholarly book or journal article. The full text of the material, not just the references, shall be present. If the supporting texts are copyright-encumbered and cannot be posted on the ETHW for intellectual property reasons, the proposers shall email a copy to the History Center so that it can be forwarded to the Advocate. If the Advocate does not consider the supporting references sufficient, the Advocate may ask the proposer(s) for additional ones.
6. Are the scholarly references sufficiently recent? Yes.
7. Does the proposed citation explain why the achievement was successful and impactful? Yes.
8. Does the proposed citation include important technical aspects of the achievement? Yes.
9. Is the proposed citation readable and understandable by the general public? Yes.
10. Will the citation be read correctly in the future by only using past tense? Yes. Does the citation wording avoid statements that read accurately only at the time that the proposal is written? Yes.
11. Does the proposed plaque site fulfill the requirements? Yes.
12. Is the proposal quality comparable to that of IEEE publications? Yes.
13. Are any scientific and technical units correct (e.g., km, mm, hertz, etc.)? N/A Are acronyms correct and properly upper-cased or lower-cased? Yes. Are the letters in any acronym explained in the title or the citation? Yes.
14. Are date formats correct as specified in Section 6 of Milestones Program Guidelines? Helpful Hints on Citations, plaque locations Yes.
15. Do the year(s) appearing in the citation fall within the range of the year(s) included at the end of the title? Yes.
16. Note that it is the Advocate's responsibility to confirm that the independent reviewers have no conflict of interest (e.g., that they do not work for a company or a team involved in the achievement being proposed, that they have not published with the proposer(s), and have not worked on a project related to the funding of the achievement). An example of a way to check for this would be to search reviewers' publications on IEEE Xplore.

Independent Expert Reviewers’ Checklist

1. Is suggested wording of the Plaque Citation accurate?
2. Is evidence presented in the proposal of sufficient substance and accuracy to support the Plaque Citation?
3. Does proposed milestone represent a significant technical achievement?
4. Were there similar or competing achievements? If so, have the proposers adequately described these and their relationship to the achievement being proposed?
5. Have proposers shown a clear benefit to humanity?

In answering the questions above, the History Committee asks that independent expert reviewers apply a similar level of rigor to that used to peer-review an article, or evaluate a research proposal. Some elaboration is desirable. Of course the Committee would welcome any additional observations that you may have regarding this proposal.

Submission and Approval Log (For staff use only)

Submitted date: 17 January 2025
Advocate approval date:
History Committee approval date:
Board of Directors approval date:

Expert Review #1: Dr. Kees Schouhamer Immink -- Bberg (talk) 16:45, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

1. Is suggested wording of the Plaque Citation accurate? Yes.
2. Is evidence presented in the proposal of sufficient substance and accuracy to support the Plaque Citation? Yes.
3. Does proposed milestone represent a significant technical achievement? Yes.
4. Were there similar or competing achievements? If so, have the proposers adequately described these and their relationship to the achievement being proposed? No, I do not know of any competing achievements.
5. Have proposers shown a clear benefit to humanity? Yes.
   

Kees A. Schouhamer Immink (M'81-SM'86-F'90) received his PhD degree from the Eindhoven University of Technology. He was from 1994 till 2014 an adjunct professor at the Institute for Experimental Mathematics, Essen-Duisburg University, Germany. He has been a visiting professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). In 1998, he founded Turing Machines Inc., an innovative start-up.

Immink designed coding techniques of digital audio and video recording products such as Compact Disc, CD-ROM, DCC, DV, DVD, and Blu-ray Disc. He received a Knighthood in 2000, a personal ‘Emmy’ award in 2004, the 2017 IEEE Medal of Honor, the 1999 AES Gold Medal, the 2004 SMPTE Progress Medal, the 2014 Eduard Rhein Prize for Technology, and the 2015 IET Faraday Medal. In 1998, he received the Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation by the IEEE Information Theory Society. He was inducted into the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame, elected into the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, and the (US) National Academy of Engineering. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Johannesburg in 2014. He served the profession as President of the Audio Engineering Society inc., New York, in 2003.

Expert Review #2: Dr. Andrew D. Brown -- Bberg (talk) 18:54, 28 January 2025 (UTC)

1. Is suggested wording of the Plaque Citation accurate? Yes.
2. Is evidence presented in the proposal of sufficient substance and accuracy to support the Plaque Citation? Yes, it is.
3. Does proposed milestone represent a significant technical achievement? Yes, very much so.
4. Were there similar or competing achievements? No. If so, have the proposers adequately described these and their relationship to the achievement being proposed? Yes, as the proposal puts the contemporay work into context accurately.
5. Have proposers shown a clear benefit to humanity? Yes, very much so.
   

Andrew D. Brown has a BSc in physical electronics (1976) and a PhD in microelectronics (1981), both from the University of Southampton, UK. He has held visiting posts at IBM Hursley Park (UK), Siemens NeuPerlach (Germany), Multiple Access Communications (UK), LME Design Automation (UK), Trondheim University (Norway), Cambridge University (UK) and Ecole Polytechnique Federale Lausanne (Switzerland). He is currently a Professor of Electronics at Southampton University, UK.

Dr. Brown has been an Associate Editor of the IET Electronics Letters journal, and has served on numerous conference program committees. His current research interests include event-driven massively parallel computing systems, computational chemistry and financial technology. He has been a Senior Member of the IEEE (SMIEEE), and is currently a Fellow of the IET (FIET) and BCS (FBCS), a Chartered Engineer (CEng), a Certified IT Professional (CITP), a European Engineer (Eur Ing) and a member of the Association of Computing Machinery (MACM).

His work in microelectronics included being part of the team that designed and built the first direct-write cathode-ray photographic mask system, leading to an interest in design automation, and he worked for several years on IC mask algebra, simulation and behavioural synthesis systems. This, in turn, led to working on problems that are usually way out of reach of current conventional compute capabilities: modelling neural aggregates (a quasi-discrete problem with datasets of O(10^11) nodes) and computational chemistry (following the trajectories of individual chemical entities/species to predict gross chemical (biological) behaviour, e.g., being able to predict the endocytosis geometry (burrowing in) of a virus into a biological cell, given only the pairwise particle-particle interactions. The latter two areas of interest led to the design/deployment of million-core machines (SpiNNaker, led out of Manchester), and POETS (a smaller but more powerful machine, from Southampton).