Joe Desch Innovation Award
The Engineers Club of Dayton proudly instituted the Joe Desch Innovention Award in 2008. This award is named for the Daytonian who, working in secrecy during World War II, designed innovative and crucial analytical equipment. In that spirit, this award recognizes those who advanced the frontiers of information science, information technology, and allied fields of electrical engineering, perhaps with little recognition.
The Engineers Club chooses a person working in information science and technology or who may be working in allied sciences who has, through their work addressed a significant problem or challenge; advanced the state of the art through technology; or improved the quality of research or product through an innovative approach to education.
Announcing the 2011 Honoree: Whitfield Diffie
Whitfield Diffie took cryptography out of the hands of the spooks and made privacy possible in the digital age – by inventing the most revolutionary concept in encryption since the Renaissance.
Steven Levy, in crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government – Saving Privacy in the Digital Age
It’s invisible. You can’t feel it. It’s a concept, not a piece of hardware. And yet it’s crucially important to our day to day life. It’s called the Diffie-Hellman key exchange.
If you go online, as 2 billion people around the globe now do, the security of your communications depend upon this concept, conceived by Whitfield Diffie and first published by Whit and his colleague Martin Hellman in 1976. Their proposal was a simple but revolutionary approach to information security based not on a shared secret key but instead separate keys for encryption and decryption.
The Diffie-Hellman key exchange ultimately altered the landscape of global communications.
I’m excited to present the 2011 Joe Desch Innovation Award to Whitfield Diffie at the Engineers Club at our Annual Awards dinner the evening of Sept. 20th
Reception 5 pm
Dinner 6pm
Award ceremony 7pm
Dessert 8:30 pm
All events at the Engineers Club of Dayton
For tickets call (937) 228-2148
Previous Honorees
John H. Birden and Kenneth C. Jordan (deceased) were awarded the 2010 Joe Desch Innovation Awards. In 1954 Birden and Jordan, working at the Mound Labs in Miamisburg, Ohio, originated the radioisotopic thermoelectric generator. This invention would generate electrical energy from radioactivity. These RTGs are the power supplies for today’s long-range space exploration, allowing digital equipments to operate in the foreign and harsh environments of space.
The 2009 honoree was Dr. Peter Brody of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.. Dr. Brody ‘s research, which first received attention in 1963 but continues today, produced an active-matrix electroluminescent video panel, and the active-matrix LCD panel which is in widespread use today.
The recipient of the 2008 Joe Desch Innovation Award was John Paul Janning of Dayton, Ohio. In the early 1960s at NCR, Janning conducted advanced research on the processes to produce a thermal printing wafer, a familiar component of thermal printers. He holds nine patents on flat panel plasma display technology including the all silk-screened manufacturing process by which present plasma displays are made. In total he holds 249 patents, in the US and internationally, and has written numerous publications.
Historical Background
Why the Joe Desch Award?
The Engineers Club instituted this award to recognize the contributions of those who are currently advancing the information technology in the digital age. The achievements of Joe Desch are significant in this context for he, working in a small lab at National Cash Register Company, developed thermionic tube technology for electronic counters that was part of early digital technology at the outbreak of World War II.
The U.S. Navy, impressed by Desch’s research, then chose his lab to design and build a machine to analyze and read–”break”–communications enciphered on the German Naval Enigma machine during the war.
In 1947 Desch was awarded the Presidential Medal for Merit by Harry S. Truman. This work was not declassified until 1992 and even today is not widely known.
When Desch’s cryptanalytic machine was first displayed at the Smithsonian in 1993, it was a showpiece of one of the first exhibits to outline what we now recognize as The Age of Information. The digital technology Desch employed and much of the electronics he studied and advanced are now in the main stream of daily life. This industry has grown to include telecommunications, data standardization and management, computer and server hardware, public cryptography, and many more allied fields.
The selection and award process are coordinated by Deborah Desch Anderson, daughter of Joseph Desch and member of the Dayton Engineers Club.