John Sokol's Home Page     约翰.索科尔                        

BACKGROUND                        

My passion for many years has been audio and video. Starting from fixing TV's and Stereo's back in grade school to helping set up a Cable TV station for my High School, Clifton New Jersey Channel V.

I have been a computer expert for as far back as I can remember building my first microprocessor system when I was 7 years old without help. Back in the mid 80's had become an expert at image processing and was "Mr. Imaging on microscopes" at Stanford for a while doing everything from Time Lapse photography of Cells to precision measurements of magnetic recording head gaps and verification of silicon photo lithography systems.

Starting in 1984 I became passionate about BSD Unix and FreeBSD more recently, 1987 to 1993 and even participated in the creation of 386BSD the First open source BSD Unix.
BSD News Articles that refer to me

Since 1991 I have become very involved with Streaming video and video compression technology. The mathematics of Information Theory, probabilities, entropy, error correction, encryption and compression are the things I truly love in life. It is these things that glue together the mysteries of the Universe.

I was mention in Red Herring this past December - Silent Computing article

I have come to find compression; encryption and error correction are all very closely related. All three deal with the question of what is the minimum amount of data needed before you can understand a message.

Trying to understand the very nature of information itself and what is required for it to be useful or intelligible.

With Compression it.s about elimination of redundant and unnecessary information without damaging the message.
With Encryption it about hiding, rearranging or adding of data to make a message un-intelligible but with the addition of a small amount of information make it intelligible once again.
With Error Correction it.s about adding enough redundant information to allow a message to get damaged and remain intelligible.

Different end goals that are all based on the same identical underlying principals

These mathematical foundations of information theory were first laid out by Claude Shannon in 1947 .A mathematical theory of communication.. In this he bridges information with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Past Accomplishments

Current projects, Past projects and Interests

Sokol Name on different products

This Page last updated 9/2011