Washington University’s Ron Indeck received the Missouri Inventor of the Year award last Wednesday from the patent and trademark division of the Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis. Indeck, a professor in the department of electrical engineering since 1988, is the Das Family Distinguished Professor as well as the Director of the Center for Security Technologies. He already holds twelve patents.

“I don’t consider myself an inventor,” said Indeck. “I just like to play [with] and solve problems. We end up being at the right place at the right time, sometimes, and that ends up being something that appears to be inventive.”

Indeck is no stranger to awards. He has already accepted the 1989 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award from President George H. W. Bush, the IBM Faculty Development Award and the Washington University Distinguished Faculty Award, among others.

Indeck’s most recent invention, which he formulated along with three computer scientists at the University, involves shortening the amount of time it takes to access vast amounts of electronically stored information. Indeck and his co-workers discovered this new expedient search method by moving the searching closer to the database and by employing a -programmable gate array, which searches systems directly instead of in chunks. In essence, this invention allows industries that have enormous databases, such as biotechnology companies, to cut their search times.

“[Search times can be cut] on the order of a hundred times or more, which means that things that would take a week to process, like a genomic application, will now be able to be done in a matter of hours,” Indeck explained.

Ron Cytron, professor of computer science and engineering at the University and one of Indeck’s colleagues on the information accessing system project, elaborated on the concept.

“Imagine a phonebook where all of the names inside are jumbled up and not in alphabetical order. Nobody’s made an index, but you want to search for your name or find your phone number,” Cytron said. “[This is for] any company that wants to search large volumes of data but doesn’t want to bother creating an index.”

Indeck is also helping federal intelligence agencies access information.

“What we’re trying to help them do, instead of just doing forensics-that is, going back and figuring out ‘who were the people that did whatever they did on 9/11′-is to find these things fast enough so we can preempt that type of incident,” said Indeck. “We’re [trying] to give them the ability to access the information.”

Procuring information from a large pool can also be applied to smaller storage units, such as iPods. Although Apple, to his knowledge, is not currently working on this type of technology, Cytron had the novel idea of allowing iPod jammers new ways of accessing the songs they want to hear.

“Imagine that you have your 20,000 songs on your iPod, but you don’t remember what song it is that you’re looking for,” said Indeck. “Wouldn’t it be great it you could just hum a few bars, and then the internals of the device would be able to parse the signal from your hum? You’re not going to hum it the same way that Aerosmith played it, but [the iPod] would be able to find, approximately, the song that it is that you’re humming.”

Cytron explained the accessing matter further.

“If you think about it, all it would take is digitizing the relative pitches that you hum,” he said. “Even if you’re not a great singer, you could still approximately pick up [the tune] and then [program] the same [pitches] for the songs that are stored on the iPod.”

Indeck was also the mastermind behind the 1993 patent of using magnetic media strip as a way to create unique fingerprints for objects like credit cards. Now used by MasterCard to test for fraudulent credit cards, Indeck’s invention is called Magneprint.

“That was very much a product of understanding the underlying physics,” said Indeck. “Because we understood it like nobody else did, we were able to say, ‘Well, if we can do that, we can solve this challenge,’ which was being able to authenticate any kind of object that we wanted.”

Cytron, however, raved about his colleague’s efficiency and thinks that Indeck has the potential to accomplish even more.

“He has this sort of thing like, ‘Oh, I have something, it’s not a great idea but…’ said Cytron. “He’s sort of not pushing himself forward enough, given all his good ideas.”

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