[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 18 (Friday, January 28, 2022)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E73-E74]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      RECOGNIZING DR. NASIR AHMED

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. RAJA KRISHNAMOORTHI

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                        Friday, January 28, 2022

  Mr. KRISHNAMOORTHI. Madam Speaker, today I wish to recognize the 
seminal contributions of Dr. Nasir Ahmed in the field of computer 
science, whose work on image processing underlies much of the video 
conferencing and photo sharing technology that we now take for 
granted--technology that has been essential to getting us through this 
pandemic.
  Born in Bangalore, India, Dr. Ahmed immigrated to the United States 
in 1961 to pursue a masters and then a Ph.D. at the University of New 
Mexico. It was there that Dr. Ahmed met his wife, Esther Parente-Ahmed, 
whose love and support proved instrumental to Dr. Ahmed's career. 
Describing Esther, Dr. Ahmed said, ``she helped me all through my 
career; she was always next to me.''
  After receiving his doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Dr. 
Ahmed became a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at 
Kansas State University in 1968.

[[Page E74]]

While at Kansas State, Professor Ahmed developed the discrete cosine 
transform, known as DCT, as a way to compress digital images. Working 
with his Ph.D. student, T. Raj Natarajan, and colleague, Dr. K. R. Rao, 
Professor Ahmed developed a working DCT algorithm, and the results, 
first published in 1974, ``appeared too good to be true,'' in Dr. 
Ahmed's words. Indeed, the new algorithm performed better than any 
other method of digital image compression.
  In layman's terms, digital files that contain images, photos, videos, 
and audio are simply too large to practically send over the internet; 
to share this data, it must be compressed. The discrete cosine 
transform is the most widely used method for compressing digital 
images, and DCT would become the basis for innumerable other 
technologies for sharing and streaming photos, video, and audio that we 
now take for granted.
  Our zoom calls, that JPEG your friend sent you last weekend, the MP3s 
you listened to jogging this morning--it's all thanks to Nasir Ahmed.
  Madam Speaker, on behalf of all of us who use these essential 
technologies every day, I want to thank Dr. Ahmed for his contributions 
to computer science, which have brought us together and reshaped our 
world in ways we could have scarcely imagined when the discrete cosine 
transform was first published.

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