SUBJECT:

Passing of Professor Emeritus Elias Masry

Elias Masry, a pioneer in the theory and application of stochastic
processes and professor emeritus at the University of California San
Diego, passed away on March 17, 2020 in La Jolla, California. He was 83.

Professor Masry was born January 7, 1937, and grew up in Israel. He
received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in 1963 and 1965 respectively,
and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton in 1966. He earned
his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1968 from Princeton University,
and he joined the UC San Diego faculty that same year. He was a member
of the Communications Theory and Systems group in the Electrical and
Computer Engineering Department at UC San Diego and remained on the
faculty until his retirement in 2009.

Professor Masry’s distinguished research career spanned four decades and
his work covered a wide range of topics in communication systems, signal
processing, and mathematical statistics. He was a meticulous researcher
whose work was rigorous and precise. The first two decades of Professor
Masry’s research made seminal contributions to the fundamental aspects
of stochastic processes and involved questions of representations,
modeling and estimation. His work made extensive contributions in the
areas of covariance, spectral, and probability density estimation,
inverse problems in nonlinear systems, optimal sampling designs, Monte
Carlo integration, deconvolution methods in probability density and
regression functions estimation, to mention a few. In addition to
developing novel methods for estimation, his work always involved a
rigorous analysis characterizing the quality of the estimation method,
usually as a function of the number of samples. In the last two decades
of his research work, he continued to make contributions to the theory
of representing and processing of stochastic processes. A sampling of
his contributions include local polynomial regression fitting for
short-range and long-range dependent data, wavelet representation of
stochastic processes and applications to function estimation, estimation
and identification of stationary nonlinear ARCH and ARX systems, and
sampling theorems for stochastic processes. In addition to the
theoretical work, his work addressed important problems in digital
communications and signal processing which clearly benefitted from his
expertise in stochastic processes. This included interference rejection
in spread-spectrum communication systems, analysis of adaptive filtering
algorithms, and the design and analysis of multi-antenna wireless
communication systems.

Professor Masry was elected a Fellow of IEEE in 1986 for his
contributions to the theory of stochastic processes and time series
analysis in sampled data systems and digital communication systems. He
served as Associate Editor for Stochastic Processes for the IEEE
Transactions on Information Theory 1980-83 and was the Publications
Chairman of the 1990 International Symposium on Information Theory in
San Diego. He was honored by his students in Electrical and Computer
Engineering with the Graduate Teaching Award in 2000 and the
Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2001.

He will be deeply missed by his family, his colleagues and friends, and
the UC San Diego community. He is survived by his sister Rachel Shasha
and her two daughters and five grandchildren, and by his brother Sami
Metser and his wife, two sons and two grandchildren.

An event celebrating his life will be organized when campus can resume
large social gatherings again.

Albert P. Pisano Dean, Jacobs School of Engineering Bill Lin Professor and Chair, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering