MERKLE LLC
ORLANDO, FLORIDA

Michael Riskin, Ph.D. / CPA, has been an Alcor member since the mid 1980's and a board member since 1993. Michael has served Alcor in various capacities over the years including that of Membership Ombudsman, Vice President, and Chairman of the Board. He is currently the Alcor Board representative to the Alcor Patient Care Trust Board. Michael's wife, Anita Banker Riskin, also an Alcor member since the 80's, suffered legal death in early 2006 and is now in long term bio-stasis in Scottsdale. He is both a California State Licensed Psychotherapist and Certified Public Accountant, with a private psychology practice in Santa Ana, California. The other half of his professional life is that of a business consultant to startups and more mature companies facing a variety of organizational and marketing challenges. Michael believes that being alive, healthy, and happy is a good thing. He intends to enjoy as much of that trinity as long as is possible. Michael R. Seidl has been an Alcor member since 1998, served as a director from 2002 until 2013, and returned to the board in 2016. Mr. Seidl has lived in Delaware since 1998, where he practices law in a boutique firm specializing in corporate insolvency and related litigation. From 1996 to 1998, he served as the judicial law clerk to the Honorable Jonathan R. Steinberg on the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. He is a graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center (J.D., 1996), where he served as managing editor of the Journal of Law & Policy in International Business Brian Wowk, Ph.D., is a biophysicist employed as a Senior Scientist at 21st Century Medicine, Inc., a company specializing in low temperature preservation of tissue and organs for medical applications. He holds M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in medical physics, specializing in radiation oncology physics and magnetic resonance imaging. He is a leading expert in cryopreservation by vitrification. Dr. Wowk has maintained an interest in cryonics since 1986. He has served on Alcor’s board of directors since 2004. Considered one of the most influential and productive information theorists of today, the fundamental and cutting-edge contributions of Shlomo Shamai have been central to continued progress in wireless communications systems by addressing areas such as channel capacity, secure transmission, and the building blocks for next-generation wireless systems. Multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) technology multiplies the capacity of wireless communications networks, and Shamai has provided the most conclusive results on MIMO broadcast channels as an enabler of capacity expansion. He demonstrated that Costa (dirty paper) coding is the fundamental method for capacity-optimal signaling. His work has inspired much follow-up research toward the goal of achieving full capacity in MIMO broadcast channels. Shamai is among the first who introduced large random matrix concepts into information theory, which has had important implications for analyzing the performance of multiuser detection algorithms and quantifying the theoretical limits of multiantenna communication. Shamai and his collaborators provided inspiring and fundamental analytic connections between information and estimation in a Gaussian regime. His outage capacity concept has spanned beyond information theory as a useful tool to study the impact of antenna design on channel capacity. Shamai was instrumental in developing an understanding of efficient communications of fading channels, where severe interference from obstacles and propagation can degrade signal quality. He was among the first to study cellular communications in the fading regime and also presented the concept of block-fading channels. This concept has become a standard model allowing for progress in understanding fading channels. Shamai’s recent work has addressed a rich variety of aspects in cooperative cellular communication models, physical-layer security in wireless networks, including developing basic security results for MIMO systems, and characterizing the ability of fading broadcast channels to support variable-rate secured data transmission. He is also contributing to the foundations for cloud-based radio networks and next-generation (5G and beyond) wireless network architectures. Abbas El Gamal’s lasting contributions to information theory, wireless networks, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and digital imaging have immensely impacted a wide variety of information technology applications critical in today’s society. His early work formed the basis for several new areas in multi-user information theory, paving the way to capacity results integral to today’s communications networks. He determined the capacity of the product of Gaussian broadcast channels and of deterministic interference channels leading to recent advances in multi-antenna and interference-limited wireless networks. Together with Thomas Cover, he established the first upper and lower bounds on the capacity of the three-node relay network. This work introduced the cut-set upper bound for networks, which is widely used in information theory today, as well as the compress-forward and decode-forward schemes, which continue to be the dominant relaying techniques. His recent work has involved the creation of coding schemes for sending multiple sources over noisy networks, and significant contributions to wireless networks through characterizing their optimal delay-throughput tradeoff and devising schemes for energy-efficient packet transmission scheduling. His book Network Information Theory (Cambridge Press, 2011) with Young-Han Kim provides the first unified and comprehensive coverage of the field. El Gamal’s contributions to hardware design include the development of integrated circuit fabrics and tools that significantly reduce design time and cost of systems used in computing, communication, and signal-processing applications. In 1986, he co-founded Actel, where he co-invented the routing architecture used in all commercial FPGAs today. He subsequently pioneered the use of FPGAs in teaching digital system design, which has become standard in all electrical engineering programs.