Frederick Jelinek, professor of electrical and computer engineering, passed away last night. According to Lieutenant Mark Long of Campus Safety and Security, Jelinek was found in a computer science restroom in an unresponsive state at 9:36 PM and was taken to Union Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead by natural causes at 10:27 PM. He was 67.
Having received his Ph.D at MIT, Jelinek taught at MIT, Harvard and Cornell before joining IBM as a researcher.
It was after his time with IBM in 1993 that he joined Hopkins, where he taught until his death.
However, despite his dedication to academia, Jelinek will perhaps be best remembered for his pioneering research in the fields of information theory, automatic speech recognition and natural language processing.
Indeed, in an e-mail sent to notify the student body of Jelinek’s death, Dean of the Whiting School of Engineering Nicholas Jones wrote that “[Jelinek] was among the first to understand the importance of probabilistic modeling in automatic speech recognition and helped create the statistical methods that form the basis of today’s state-of-the art speech and language technology.”
Executive Director of Communications and Public Affairs Dennis O’Shea agreed, saying that “[Jelinek] was a brilliant researcher and teacher who built the foundations of an entire field of speech recognition.”
Jelinek is survived by his wife, Milena; son, William; and daughter, Hannah.
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