Peter Franaszek

Who is Peter Franaszek?

Peter A. Franaszek is an American information theorist, an IEEE fellow, a research staff member emeritus at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and a former member of the IBM Academy of Technology. He received his Sc.B. from Brown University in 1962, and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1966.

His work was mainly on the representation of information for storage and transmission, and the placement and movement of such information in computer systems. Specific areas include constrained coding, compression algorithms, I/O architectures, switching networks, disk defragmentation algorithms, concurrency control techniques, operating system schedulers, and compression techniques and architectures for systems with memory compression. Franaszek's coding research determined fundamental aspects of constrained coding, and obtained algorithms for code construction. His work served as a basis for key components in the proliferation of disk drives, compact disks, and digital versatile disks. Specific codes he developed have been widely used in commercial data storage and transmission products.