Biography
Elliot Eichen is Director of eServices and Architecture at Verizon Communication, and an adjunct faculty member in the Telecommunications Systems Management program, Electrical Engineering Department at Northeastern University. He received a B.S. in physics from SUNY Stony Brook in 1974, a Ph.D. in optics from the Optical Sciences Center, University of Arizona, in 1982, and a MBA from Boston University (executive MBA program) in 1995. Dr. Eichen graduated from New York City’s High School of Music and Art (now LaGuardia School of the Arts) as a music major in 1970.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, as a staff member at GTE Laboratories, Dr. Eichen was primarily interested in quantum optics and optical communications. His contributions include measurements that validated theories to describe the coherence properties of semiconductor lasers, the first proposals and demonstrated use of optical amplifiers for video distribution (particularly in the optical noise limited domain where the input can be passively split w/o reduction in signal-to-noise), early work on optical packet switching and fiber based optical facilities switching, and the use of frequency to amplitude modulation and optical white noise to characterize optical detectors at very high (> 20GHz) modulation frequencies. During this period, Dr. Eichen was also a Visiting Industry Professor in the electro optics program at Tufts University, where he taught graduate classes in Fourier Optics and Optical Communications.
In the late 1990s, Dr. Eichen interests shifted to broadband communications and IP telephony. He contributed to the first tests and deployment of digital subscriber loop technology, and was responsible for a real-time loop qualification methodology and system still in use by Verizon. In 1998, following GTE’s purchase of BBN Technologies, Dr. Eichen was asked to help form the Voice over IP engineering group at GTE Internetworking, to build a national VoIP network and service offering. GTE-I (which became Genuity, after the merger of GTE and Bell Atlantic to form Verizon) was a pioneer in the development of packet telephony networks, where Dr. Eichen was responsible for the operation support systems, service development, and customer integration groups.
Following the acquisition of Genuity by Level3, Dr. Eichen returned to Verizon in 2004, and was responsible for the development of Verizon’s hosted IP Telephony service offering (HIPC) along with its first deployment at Verizon’s new corporate headquarters in Basking Ridge. In January 2007, Dr. Eichen joined the staff at MIT, where he was responsible for development and deployment of VoIP for the MIT campus. With the successful deployment of VoIP at MIT, he rejoined Verizon Communications in 2009, where he is currently working on H.264 video communications, and integration of voice and video services across mobile and fixed network architectures.
Since 2003, Dr. Eichen has also been an adjunct professor in Telecommunications (EE-CS Department) at Northeastern University, where he teaches two graduate courses – one in IP Telephony, and the other in Mobile Application Development.
Dr. Eichen holds approximately 20 US patents, and has published about 40 peer reviewed publications. His other contributions to the technical community include:
• Program Co-Chair (2002) and Technical Program Committee (2003), Symposium on Multimedia and VoIP, IEEE International Conference on Communications.
• Associate Editor, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters (1990-1992).
• Conference Chair, Technical Program Chair, Technical Program Committee, IEEE/OSA Topical Conference on Optical Amplifiers (1990-1993).
• Committee Chair, Technical Program Committee, OSA/IEEE Optical Fiber Communications Conference (1987-1991).
• National Science Foundation, Review Committee on Optical Switching (1992).
Ieee 2009
