Frederick Jelinek - Personal Life

Personal Life

Jelinek was born Bedřich Jelínek in Kladno, a decade before WWII, to Vilém and Trude Jelinek. His father was Jewish; his mother was born in Switzerland, to Czech Catholic parents, and had converted to Judaism. Jelinek senior, a dentist, had planned early for an escape to England, arranging for a passport, visa, and the shipping of his dentistry materials; the couple planned to send their son to an English private school. However, Vilém decided to stay at the last minute, and was eventually sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he died of disease in 1945. The family was forced to move to Prague in 1941, but Frederick, his sister and mother, thanks to the latter's background, escaped the concentration camps.

"It is generally believed that scientific talent reveals itself in early youth. This was certainly not my case. I somehow slid into my scientific profession. My mother wished for me to become a physician, just like my father. I myself wanted to be a lawyer, defender of the unjustly accused. But my career is the result of political circumstances, academic possibilities, and lucky accidents."

After the war, Jelinek successfully entered in the gymnasium despite having missed several years of schooling (as education of Jewish children had been forbidden since 1942). His mother, anxious for her son to get a good education, made great efforts for their emigration, particularly as it became clear he would not be allowed to even attempt the graduation examination. His mother hoped for her son to become a physician, but Jelinek dreamed of being a lawyer; he ended up studying engineering in evening classes at the City College of New York. He received stipends from the National Committee for a Free Europe that allowed him to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. About his choice of specialty, he joked: "Fortunately, to electrical engineering there belonged a discipline whose aim was not the construction of physical systems: the theory of information." He obtained his Ph.D. in 1962, with Robert Fano as his adviser: "Not daring to approach Shannon himself, I asked Professor Fano to be my thesis adviser.".

In 1957, Jelinek paid an unexpected visit to Prague. He had been in Vienna and, hoping to see his former acquaintances again, applied for a visa. He met with his old friend Miloš Forman, who introduced him to film student Milena Tabolova, whose screenplay had been the basis for the just released movie Easy Life (Snadný život). His flight back to the U.S. had a stopover in Munich, during which he called her to propose. Tabolova was considered a dissident, and her movie did not sit well with the authorities. Jelinek asked for help from Jerome Wiesner and Cyrus Eaton, the latter who lobbied Nikita Khrushchev. Following the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, a group of Czech dissidents were allowed to emigrate in January 1961; thanks to the lobbying, the future Milena Jelinek was one of them.

After completing his graduate studies, Jelinek, who had developed an interest in linguistics, had plans to work with Charles F. Hockett at Cornell University. Unfortunately for him, these fell through and during the next ten years he continued to devote himself to information theory. Having previously worked at IBM during a sabbatical, he began work there in 1972, at first on leave for Cornell, but permanently from 1974 on; he remained there for over twenty years. Although at first he was to hold a regular research job, upon his arrival he learned that Josef Raviv had just been promoted to head of the newly opened IBM Haifa Research Laboratory, and found himself head of the Continuous Speech Recognition group at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Despite his team's successes in this area, his work remained little known in his home country, as scientists were not allowed to participate in key conferences.

After the 1989 fall of communism, he helped with establishing scientific relationships, regularly visiting to lecture and helping to convince IBM to establish a computing centre at Charles University. In 1993 he retired from IBM and went to Johns Hopkins University's Center for Language and Speech Processing, where he was director and Julian Sinclair Smith Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was still working there at the time of his death; Jelinek died of a heart attack at the close of an otherwise normal workday in mid-September 2010. He was survived by his wife, daughter and son, sister, stepsister, and three grandchildren.