A little story about Prof. Victor Wei

"Prof. Victor Wei is a perfect husband, a reliable father, a respectful professor, a role-model to the young generation and a shinning star in our heart."

Professor Victor K. Wei passed away on October 17th in Hong Kong. He was 61. Victor was born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University in 1976 and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Hawaii, Manoa, in 1980.

Dr. Wei was a Member of the Board of Governors (1991–1994) of the IEEE Information Theory Society, an Associate Editor for Coding (1989–1992) for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, and a Guest Editor for the Special Issue on Algebraic-Geometric Codes of (Vol. IT-41, No. 6, November 1995). He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1995 “for his contributions to coding theory and its applications”. 

From 1980 to 1983, he was with the Mathematical Research Center of Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ. From 1984 to 1994, he was with Bellcore, Morristown, NJ, and became Director of Communication and Computation Principles Research in 1987. As a director, Victor demanded high quality standards for his team’s research and created an environment conducive to world-class research. In 1994, he joined the Department of Information Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong at the rank of Professor until his retirement at the end of 2011. During this period, Victor focused his research on cryptography and cultivated a young generation of cryptographers for Hong Kong.

Victor was a brilliant researcher with a keen intellect, broad interests, and creative ideas. He has made note-worthy contributions to several fields, particularly coding theory and data compression. Among hisnotable contributions, his single- author paper on “generalized Hamming weights for linear codes” (IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 37, No. 5, pp. 1412-1418, 1991) was considered a breakthrough in coding theory. He introduced this innovative concept, totally new at the time, in response to a challenging problem in information-theoretic security dealing with transmission over a wire-tap channel. Victor’s idea on the generalized Hamming weights has had significant impacts to cryptography and data security. He also co-authored with Fan R.K. Chung and Jawad Salehi the well-cited paper, “Optical orthogonal codes – design, analysis and applications,” (IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 35, No. 3, pp. 595-604, 1989).

Victor’s work in the 1980’s was influential in proving that universal source coding algorithms could compress at the entropy rate of the source, a fundamental barrier. The paper that he co-authored with Bentley, Sleator, and Tarjan (“A locally adaptive data compression scheme,” Communications of the ACM, Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 320-330, 1986), for example, is directly related to the move-to-front algorithm (aka book stack algorithm). According to the SCI-JCR, the Science Citation Index iV Journal Citation Report (2003), Victor was among the top 250 most cited computer scientists in the 20 years prior to that. He continued to do research after retirement, working on topics that include the minimum rank distance of Gabidulin codes, as well as error control coding for random network coding. Prior to his passing, he had prepared two manuscripts entitled, “Revisiting the Minimum Rank Distance of Gabidulin Codes,” and “An Intractability Approach to Error Control in Random Network Coding.”

Victor was a person with many talents and interests. Since his youth, he was ingenious, with a particular facility in mathematics. In the 1972 Joint College Entrance Examination in Taiwan, he attained the highest score, among more than 30,000 entrants. Victor was an unconventional and innovative thinker, a skillful player of both Go and Bridge, and he once made Chinese riddles from the names of his college classmates. Victor was also fun-loving and adventurous. He cherished outdoor activities and ran marathons during his graduate school years in Hawaii. In his later years, he became passionate about history. Victor was dearly loved and will be greatly missed by his colleagues, friends, and family.

Victor is survived by his wife, Betty, and two daughters, Francine and Chloe. A memorial service, Celebrating Victor Wei’s Life, was held on November 6, 2015 at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. 

Memorial Service

Date        :      Nov 6, 2015 (Friday)

Time        :     7:30pm (Refreshments will be served at 6:45pm)

Venue      :     LT2, Yasumoto International Academic Park (YIA, 康本國際學術園)
                      The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T.
                      (MTR University Station Exit D) http://bit.ly/1Rfey7V

Registration  : http://goo.gl/forms/5zErMFkH7G.