Aleksandar Kavčić

Aleksandar Kavčić (Serbian Cyrillic: Александар Кавчић; born 1968 in Belgrade) is a Serbian electrical engineer, university professor and philanthropist who is currently active as an Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Carnegie Mellon University since 2017 and as a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.^[1][2]

Aleksandar Kavčić Александар Кавчић
Born	1968 (age 56–57) Belgrade, Yugoslavia
Alma mater	University of Belgrade School of Electrical Engineering
Scientific career
Fields	Electrical engineering
Institutions	Carnegie Mellon University
Website	fondacijaalekkavcic.org

Biography

He studied at the prestigious Mathematical Grammar School and University of Belgrade School of Electrical Engineering. After completing his studies, Kavčić moved abroad due to the civil war which took place in former Yugoslavia.^[3]

Prior to 2017, Kavčić served as assistant professor, associate professor and professor of electrical engineering at Harvard University and the University of Hawai'i at Manoa where he is presently Professor of Electrical Engineering. He also served as visiting associate professor at the City University of Hong Kong in the Fall of 2005 and as visiting scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the Spring of 2006.^[4]

In 2016, the Carnegie Mellon University won a lawsuit against the Marvell Technology Group for infringing intellectual property of Kavčić and his mentor Jose Moura, gaining a settlement of US$750,000,000.^[5][6]

He is the founder of "Alek Kavčić Foundation" which has the goal to provide high-quality textbooks available for free download for all elementary school students in Serbia.^[7][8] Over the years, he donated new computers to a number of high schools in Serbia.^[9][10]

Kavčić resides in Austin and Belgrade.^[9]

Political career

In the 2020 Serbian parliamentary elections, he was a candidate for MP on the electoral list of the Enough is Enough (DJB) party, and Kavčić was presented as the president of the party education board. The party failed to pass the electoral threshold, and Kavčić decided to leave the party.^[11]

Selected works

• The Viterbi algorithm and Markov noise memory, co-author, 2000^[12]
• Binary intersymbol interference channels: Gallager codes, density evolution, and code performance bounds, co-author, 2003
• Equal-diagonal QR decomposition and its application to precoder design for successive-cancellation detection, co-author, 2005
• Simulation-based computation of information rates for channels with memory, co-author, 2006
• The feasibility of magnetic recording at 10 terabits per square inch on conventional media, co-author, 2009