Gerard Battail

Gérard Battail was born in Paris, France, on June 5, 1932. He graduated at the Faculté des Sciences (1954) and the Ecole nationale supérieure des Télécommunications (ENST) in 1956, both in Paris. After his military duty, he joined the Centre national d’Etudes des Télécommunications (CNET) in 1959. He worked there on modulation systems and especially on frequency modulation, using fundamental concepts of information theory to understand its behaviour in the presence of noise, especially the threshold effect. In 1966, he joined the Compagnie française Thomson-Houston (later become Thomson-CSF) as a scientific advisor to technical teams designing radioelectric de[1]vices. There he interpreted channel coding as a diversity system for designing decoders, especially soft-input ones. He also worked on source coding, frequency synthesizers, mobile communication and other problems related to the design of industrial radiocommunication devices. In 1973, he joined ENST as a Professor. He taught there modulation, information theory and coding. He had also research activities in the same fields with special emphasis on adaptive algorithms as regards source coding and, for channel coding, on soft-in, soft-output decoding of product and concatenated codes. He proposed as a criterion for designing good codes the closeness of its distance distribution with respect to that of random coding instead of maximizing the minimum distance. These rather unorthodox views are now recognized as having paved the way to the invention of turbocodes by Berrou and Glavieux in the early 90s. After his retirement in 1997, he started working on applications of information theory to the sciences of nature. He especially investigated the role of information theory and error-correcting codes in genetics and biological evolution, showing that the conservation of genomes needs error-correcting means. He applied for many patents, wrote many papers and participated in many symposia and workshops. He also authored a textbook on information theory published by Masson in 1997. He is a member of the Société de l’Electricité, de l’Electronique, des Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication (SEE) and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Before his retirement, he was a member of the editorial board of the Annales des Télécommunications. From 1990 to 1997, he was the French official member of Commission C of URSI (International Radio-Scientific Union). From June 2001 to May 2004, he served as Associate Editor at Large of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.