Richard "Dick" Francis Lyon (born 1952) is an American inventor, scientist, and engineer. He is one of the two people who independently invented the first optical mouse devices in 1980.[1][2][3] He has worked in signal processing and was a co-founder of Foveon, Inc., a digital camera and image sensor company.
Lyon grew up in El Paso, Texas, as the third of nine children.[4] His father, an engineer for the El Paso Electric Company, brought home an early Fortran programming manual to encourage his family's members to explore their interests in electronics.[5]
After Stanford, Lyon worked at Stanford Telecommunications, a small start up company developing signal sets for navigation satellites and Space Shuttle communication systems. During a return visit to Caltech around two and a half years after graduating, he ran into Carver Mead, who was hosting Ivan Sutherland and Bert Sutherland to develop some collaborations between Caltech and Xerox PARC and to develop a computer science department. Lyon joined Xerox PARC in 1977 after interviewing on invitation by Bert Sutherland.[5]
Lyon started working at Xerox PARC with George White under Lynn Conway to build custom microchips for speech processing and digital filtering. Within the year, White left to manage the west coast laboratory of the ITT Defense Communications Division in San Diego, leaving Lyon in charge of the speech recognition project. During this period, he took a course at Stanford on biological information processing and wrote his term paper outlining an approach for speech recognition using a signal processing model of hearing.[7] The paper became the basis for his career in hearing research.[5]
In December 1980, Lyon was one of two people working independently who invented the first optical mouse devices.[2] Lyon's design involved defining screen location using an adaptation of optical lateral inhibition to achieve a wide dynamic range.[8]
Although several people at PARC had filed invention proposals for an optical mouse, none of them had built one or filed a patent for one.[5] A substantially different design was invented at approximately the same time as Lyon's by Steve Kirsch at MIT.
In 1981, Lyon was one of the "Marty randoms" recruited by Jay Martin Tenenbaum to join Schlumberger Palo Alto Research. There, he led the speech recognition project.[5]
In 2006, Lyon returned to corporate research, moving to Google after briefly considering Yahoo. His research at Google has involved managing the camera development for Google Street View and sound recognition for various Google products. Most recently, he taught a course in 2010 at Stanford University and wrote a book, Human and Machine Hearing: Extracting Meaning from Sound, published in 2017.[5][20]
Lyon in 2017 at the Library of Trinity College Dublin's Long Room, posing with Brian Boru's harp.Optical mouse: Lyon was one of two people who independently invented the first optical mouse devices.[21] The other was Steve Kirsch, who independently invented a different type of optical mouse at MIT at approximately the same time. Both of them applied for patents on their schemes in mid-1981, and each of them received two U.S. patents (now expired).[22][23]
Digital memory: With Richard R. "Bic" Schediwy at Schlumberger, Lyon did early work on semi-static CMOS memory and designed the most efficient large CMOS address decoder.[27][28]
Auditory processing: Lyon invented a cochlear model that is used as the basis of much auditory research today.[29]
In 2003, Lyon was elected as an IEEE Fellow "for contributions to VLSI signal processing, models of hearing, handwriting recognition, and electronic color photography".[32]
In 2005, Lyon became one of the people featured in George Gilder's book, The Silicon Eye, which covered the development of the Foveon X3 sensor.[34]
In 2010, Lyon was named an ACM Fellow "for contributions to machine perception and for the invention of the optical mouse."[35]
In 2017, Lyon received the Industrial Innovation Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Society "for contributions in integrated circuits, cameras, and audio processing".[36]
^ abYaeger, Larry S.; Webb, Brandyn J.; Lyon, Richard F. (15 March 1998). "Combining Neural Networks and Context-Driven Search for Online, Printed Handwriting Recognition in the Newton". AI Magazine. 19 (1): 73. doi:10.1609/aimag.v19i1.1355. ISSN0738-4602.
^Lyon, Richard F. (October 1981). "The Optical Mouse, and an Architectural Methodology for Smart Digital Sensors", Invited Paper, CMU Conference on VLSI Systems and Computations, Pittsburgh (Kung, Sproull, and Steele, editors), Computer Science Press.
^Richard F. Lyon and James J. Spilker, Jr., "Multisatellite Signal Simulators for the Global Positioning System",
National Telecommunications conference, Dallas, Texas, December 1976.
^U.S. patent 4,494,021: Bell, Lyon, and Borriello, "Self-calibrated Clock and Timing Signal Generator for MOS/VLSI Circuitry", 15 January 1985.
^U.S. patent 4,513,427: Borriello, Lyon, and Bell, "Data and Clock Recovery System for Data Communication Controller", 23 April 1985.
^Lyon, Richard F. (May 1982). "A computational model of filtering, detection, and compression in the cochlea". ICASSP '82. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Vol. 7. pp. 1282–1285. doi:10.1109/ICASSP.1982.1171644.
^U.S. patent 6,078,429:
Lyon, "Color Separating Prism Having Violet Light Component in Red Channel", 20 June 2000.
