Herb Siegel received a B. A.
in Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1962
and a Master of Arts in the same field from California State University
at Los Angeles. He has worked at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena for sixteen years. Before coming to JPL, he had broad
experience with computer programming in private industry and local
government.
At JPL, he is currently a Senior Engineer in IS and CS with a
discipline in Advanced Computing. He is a key member of the team
developing the Terrain Generation system. This system provides both
purely synthetic terrain as well as synthetically enhanced site terrain
for Mars EDL (Entry Descent and Landing) and rover missions.
Herb has also recently developed automated playback software to
retrieve multi station radio-metric spacecraft tracking data and quasar
data for correlation processing. A novel capability created by Herb
Siegel is software that performs self configuration. Playback occurs at
a time adjusted for the difference in system clocks and neither
tracking station nor correlator is told who is sending and who is
receiving scan data. This is determined at the start of tracking by
calibration and processing capability evaluation.
He is also developing a visualization tool, the Multi Surface Light
Table (MSLT) which will permit the concurrent examination of multiple
earthquake fault surfaces as well as the earth's surface. The first
version which is now running, shows fault segments from any viewpoint
underground below a coregistered DEM rendered LandSat terrain. Faults
and terrain are normally translucently displayed while selected fault
catalog data is automatically presented.
Previously, he was the chief computational scientist for the Round
II Earth Space Science Grand Challenge "Advanced Computing Technology
Applications to SAR Interferometry and Imaging Science" team to
develop software for interferometric SAR Image Processing on massively
parallel computers and designed the Digital Light Table, a tool for
visualizing multi-gigapixel remote sensor data. Prior to that, he
developed radiometric data types for interplanetary navigation and VLBI
correlators.
In the late 1970's and early 80's, he was the chief of Research and
Development for Action Computer Enterprise, a company which he helped
establish. He designed and wrote the Distributed Processing
Computer Operating System which was subsequently licensed to Televideo,
Reynolds and Reynolds, and other companies. His computer architecture
was among the first for microcomputer multi-processors.
His current interests include interactive 3D visualization and
simulation on parallel super-computers. Expertise has focused on
scaling real applications to make effective use of massively parallel
computers connected by very high bandwidth networks.
