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Recognizing Dr. Nasir Ahmed

Floor Speech

Date: Jan. 28, 2022
Location: Washington, DC

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Mr. KRISHNAMOORTHI. Madam Speaker, today I wish to recognize the seminal contributions of Dr. Nasir Ahmed in the field of computer science, whose work on image processing underlies much of the video conferencing and photo sharing technology that we now take for granted--technology that has been essential to getting us through this pandemic.

Born in Bangalore, India, Dr. Ahmed immigrated to the United States in 1961 to pursue a masters and then a Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico. It was there that Dr. Ahmed met his wife, Esther Parente-Ahmed, whose love and support proved instrumental to Dr. Ahmed's career. Describing Esther, Dr. Ahmed said, ``she helped me all through my career; she was always next to me.''

After receiving his doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Dr. Ahmed became a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Kansas State University in 1968. While at Kansas State, Professor Ahmed developed the discrete cosine transform, known as DCT, as a way to compress digital images. Working with his Ph.D. student, T. Raj Natarajan, and colleague, Dr. K. R. Rao, Professor Ahmed developed a working DCT algorithm, and the results, first published in 1974, ``appeared too good to be true,'' in Dr. Ahmed's words. Indeed, the new algorithm performed better than any other method of digital image compression.

In layman's terms, digital files that contain images, photos, videos, and audio are simply too large to practically send over the internet; to share this data, it must be compressed. The discrete cosine transform is the most widely used method for compressing digital images, and DCT would become the basis for innumerable other technologies for sharing and streaming photos, video, and audio that we now take for granted.

Our zoom calls, that JPEG your friend sent you last weekend, the MP3s you listened to jogging this morning--it's all thanks to Nasir Ahmed.

Madam Speaker, on behalf of all of us who use these essential technologies every day, I want to thank Dr. Ahmed for his contributions to computer science, which have brought us together and reshaped our world in ways we could have scarcely imagined when the discrete cosine transform was first published.

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