Bernard Widrow received the S.B., S.M., and Sc.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951, 1953, and 1956, respectively. He joined the MIT faculty and taught there from 1956 to 1959. In 1959, he joined the faculty of Stanford University, where he is currently Professor of Electrical Engineering.
He began research on adaptive filters, learning processes, and artificial neural models in 1957. Together with M.E. Hoff, Jr., his first doctoral student at Stanford, he invented the LMS algorithm in the autumn of 1959. Today, this is the most widely used learning algorithm, used in every MODEM in the world. He has continued working on adaptive signal processing, adaptive controls, and neural networks since that time.
Dr. Widrow is a Life Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of AAAS. He received the IEEE Centennial Medal in 1984, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal in 1986, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Medal in 1986, the IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Medal in 1991, the IEEE Millennium Medal in 2000, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Engineering from the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia in 2001. He was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 1995 and into the Silicon Valley Engineering Council Hall of Fame in 1999.
Dr. Widrow is a past president and member of the Governing Board of the International Neural Network Society. He is associate editor of several journals and is the author of over 125 technical papers and 21 patents. He is co-author of Adaptive Signal Processing and Adaptive Inverse Control, both Prentice-Hall books. A new book, Quantization Noise, was published by Cambridge University Press in June 2008.