LLNL electrical engineer Jim Candy never expected to be an author.
But early in his nearly 50-year Lab career, several students in a university class he was teaching helped him become one.
"I was an adjunct professor at Santa Clara University, and I needed a textbook for my students. They had gone to the school's dean and revolted against the book I was using," Candy said, with a smile crossing his face.
To solve the problem, Candy prepared a set of notes before each lecture that formed the basis for his presentations to his classes. He then took his notes, expanded them and turned them into a book.
"In effect, I developed a model-based approach for signal processing, incorporating mathematical models of the physics measurements and noise into a processing scheme," he said. "The purpose of that first textbook was to teach signal processors how to incorporate models into the processing scheme they used."
The result in 1986 was his first book: "Signal Processing: The Model-Based Approach," published by McGraw Hill.
Nearly two decades after the publication of that first book, when Candy took a sabbatical at the University of Cambridge in England in 2005, he was even introduced as the engineer who had taught other researchers how to build model-based processors.
Throughout his Lab career, Candy has continued to author signal processing textbooks on his own time for engineers, scientists and college students. This year, he wrote his seventh book - the 436-page "Signal Processing: An Applied Decomposition Approach" book, published by John Wiley/IEEE Press.
"My latest book takes complex problems and decomposes them into simpler sub-problems. It is something like taking a puzzle, breaking it apart into pieces, and then using the pieces to reassemble it," he said.
As he has written his textbooks about signal processing, Candy has found that it usually takes him about two years to write and publish a book, with each book requiring about 2,500-3,000 hours to prepare. He normally sells about 2,000 to 5,000 copies.
"I believe that engineering solutions to complex problems can be made simple and comprehensible. I write my books to share that knowledge with readers and students," he said.
Another reason he writes his books is because he considers his writing to be part of the thinking process, something that allows him to fill in the gaps for solving engineering problems.
Candy's wife, Patricia, is an artist, and she has participated in his book publishing efforts by designing cover artwork for three of his seven books.
Now the Engineering Directorate's chief scientist and a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff (DMTS), Candy has made a host of advances in the fields of signal and image processing and underwater acoustics.
Created as the top rung on a career ladder for LLNL scientists and engineers, the DMTS classification recognizes science, technology and engineering excellence with distinction and compensation, while allowing the recipients to continue their focus on delivering science and technology solutions for the Lab.
Candy, a Life Fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), has garnered a number of major awards, including the IEEE Distinguished Technical Achievement Award and the ASA Interdisciplinary Helmholtz-Rayleigh Silver Medal in Signal Processing/Underwater Acoustics.
The Lab engineer sees signal processing as based on one fundamental concept - extracting critical information from noisy, uncertain measurement data.
"Actually, the best signal processing is none; and that happens by making high-quality measurements," he said.
Through the years, Candy's discoveries have been applied to improve biomedical imaging for ultrasonic cancer detection; vibrational failure detection for prosthetic heart valves; target localization in ocean acoustics to find submarines; and other technological innovations.
