Steven S. Katz (1939-2022)
Steven S. Katz made most of his career at AT&T Bell Labs, mostly before
AT&T divestiture. He had been involved in teletraffic very early in the 60s:
he made his first ITC publication on performance evaluation of switches at
ITC 5 in New York City (1967). He worked with Norman Farber to develop a
model for estimating the traffic capacity of Electronic Switching Systems
(ESS 1), the switches being installed in AT&T network at that time. This
resulted in a paper presented by Norman at ITC 6 in Munich Germany, while
Steve also presented a paper on Trunk Engineering in Non-Hierarchical
Networks. By then, most long distance networks were hierarchically
structured, so Steve was a precursor of new traffic routing architecture. In
his role at AT&T Bell Labs, he had set up a research group that worked on
new routing models which led to the famous DNHR (Dynamic Non-Hierarchical
Routing) that was finally implemented in AT&T long distance network in 1984.
After AT&T divestiture, Steve continued his work and leadership at AT&T Labs
as networks became more intelligent and competitive. He further supported
the introduction of dynamic routing in the international networks making
profit of the non-coincidence of busy hours across the globe, through the
international WIN (Worldwide Intelligent Routing) Research Project. A
presentation of this project was presented at the 6th ITC Specialist Seminar
in Adelaide, Australia in 1989.
Steven S. Katz was highly involved in the International Advisory Council of
the ITC, being the US representative from the late 70s, after R.I.
Wilkinson. When AT&T was dismantled, he remained in the IAC as AT&T’s
representative, while Charlie Pack became the BellCore representative.
Accordingly, IAC membership status started to migrate from country
representation to company representation.
Finally Steve and Charlie both invited the ITC community in Washington DC,
USA, for ITC 15 in 1997. That was a memorable event when we experienced a
significant heatwave, as the gift t-shirt assessed. Following ITC 15,
Steve stepped down from the IAC and he was replaced by Patricia Wirth, from
Bell Labs too.
When he retired, Steve moved to Florida with his wife Zelda and lived there
for 20 years or so.
Steven S. Katz will be remembered by us as a technical innovator and a
mentor for many US colleagues in our research community.
References
- Katz, Steven S. “Statistical Performance Evaluation of a Switched Communications Network”, Fifth International Teletraffic Congress, New York, 1967
- Katz, Steven S.: “A Capacity Investigation of the No . 1 ESS Signal Processor Machine from Traffic Data”, unpublished memorandum, 1968 [Cited in the next publication]
- Farber, Norman: “A Model for Estimating the Real-Time Capacity of Certain Classes of Central Processors“, Sixth International Teletraffic Congress, Munich, 1970
- Katz, Steven S.: “Trunk Engineering of Non Hierarchical Networks“, Sixth International Teletraffic Congress, Munich, 1970
- Ash, Gerald R., Cardwell, Richard H., and Murray, R.P.: “Design and optimization of networks with dynamic routing“, Bell Syst. Tech. J ., vol.60, n°. 8, Oct. 1981
- Ash, Gerald R., Chemouil, Prosper, Kashper, Arik, Katz, Steven S., Yamazaki, Katsuyuki, and Watanabe, Yu: “Robust Design and Planning of a Worldwide Intelligent Network“, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas of Telecommunications, Vol. 7. N°. 8. October 1989
