MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

Professor Jonathan Allen passed away April 24, 2000

April 26, 2000

Professor Jonathan Allen, 65, director of MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics and Professor of Electrical engineering and Computer Science, died April 24, 2000, at Brigham and Women's Hospital of complications from a lengthy illness.

A native of Hanover, New Hampshire, Jon received the A.B. and M.S. from Dartmouth College in 1956 and 1957 respectively. He then spent a year studying mathematics at Cambridge University on a Henry Fellowship. From 1962 to 1968, he worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he became Supervisor of Human Factors Engineering in 1966. His research at Bell involved the design of semi-automatic telephone information bureaus and vocoder systems.

In 1968, Jon completed his doctoral thesis, "A Study of the Specification of Prosodic Features of Speech from a Grammatical Analysis of Printed Text," at MIT and then joined what is now MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department as an Assistant Professor. He became an Associate Professor in 1972 and a Full Professor in 1975. In 1978 he became Associate Director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. He served as director of that laboratory from 1981 until his death.

Jon's research at MIT has covered many areas, including linguistic techniques for converting text to speech, system design for continuous speech recognition, computer architecture, and integrated circuit design. He has authored or co-authored three books and nearly one hundred articles. He won the IEEE Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award in 1988 and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal, IEEE Signal Processing Society, this year.

Jon was also a dedicated, talented, and innovative educator. Recently, Jon combined his teaching and research interests in his work on interactive learning environments for VLSI design.

Jon is survived by his wife Ann Chase Allen; two sons, Douglas Allen of Auburndale, Massachusetts, and Jay Allen of Newton Center, Massachusetts; and a sister, Sylvia Nelson, of Hanover, New Hampshire.

Jon was one of a kind, the kind of leader who cannot be replaced. He will be sorely missed by all of us.