IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - August 2022 - 53

Willett
airmail! " So two weeks after the deadline I get the first set
of application forms, another two weeks I get a second
set. So no Berkeley, no California. Princeton accepted me
because there were two guys from the Technion-Abe
Haddad and Elias Masry-who did well, so they decided
to take a chance in admitting me.
The two most important things I learned from my
advisor were: i) even if an algorithm is not optimal, try it
and show that it is better than all the others for the same
problem (I am still doing this and making a living out of
it); and ii) when playing tennis, long flat shots are the best
(this became an unattainable ideal for me). As far as my
thesis is concerned, all I can say is that it was eminently
forgettable. We here at UConn train our students much
better than they did at that time at Princeton-we ask for
papers that solve real problems.
Yaakov made things perfectly clear, at the FUSION conference in
Paris in 2000.
From FUSION 2002 in Annapolis, MD, USA. Yaakov is explaining
the polka.
adjacent units with a huge metal screen to avoid radio interference.
To enjoy some challenges, I started taking classes
for the M.Sc. degree at the Technion-the best (and only)
engineering school at the time. While during the Six Day
War I was already in the reserves, I was not called to duty so
the IDF can finish the war as fast as it did. Like every officer,
we had to go and spend a night trying to ambush infiltrators
from Syria, so I was there, I had my Uzi and a couple ofgrenades.
Luckily nobody came.
Peter: I am personally interested in how you decided " I
want to study at Princeton! " Also, I imagine all present
Ph.D. students would be interested in your views of your
Ph.D. thesis.
Yaakov: I applied to several places-MIT, Berkeley, and
Princeton. Berkeley sent me the forms for application by
surface mail so when there was like one week to the deadline
I send them an airmail letter, " Please send it by
AUGUST 2022
Peter: After your Ph.D., you went to work for a private
company in the Bay Area. The company seems to have
" bred " many very successful people who have gone on to
do great things .. . you, but also others. Do you have stories
of it? Was that when you went " out of control " ?
Yaakov: I worked at Systems Control, Inc. (SCI, which
rhymes with SRI, the Stanford Research Institute, where
its founders were the control group) and this was my second
graduate school. The number of " graduates " from SCI
who went on to become professors is remarkable
-exactly a dozen. Some of the " folk tales " in circulation
at the time (early '70s) at research agencies were that " the
Kalman filter is the worst invention of the 20th century "
and " noise is beneficial since it lubricates the system. "
These stimulated me to figure out how to design a consistent
Kalman filter (where the errors are statistically comFrom
the 2008 FUSION Conference in Cologne, Germany. From
left, Jim Llinas, Yaakov Bar-Shalom, Pramod Varshney, Darko
Musicki (squatting), Xiaorong Li (Yaakov's Ph.D. grad), CheeYee
Chong.
IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE
53
IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - August 2022

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