How Nasir Ahmed Changed Your Life

And thankfully, he did so pre COVID-19.

It’s the 1970s. And Nasir is trying to explain his latest obsession to his wife.

In a televised version of the story, the show This is Us introduces us to Nasir Ahmed and his wife.

According to the show, his wife Esther, a highly-educated individual herself [later obtaining her Ph.D. in literature], could not for the life of her grasp what he is yammering about. A picture on a screen? Video on a screen? LIVE videos?

The interaction might have been dramatized. His discoveries and impacts though cannot be overstated.

These concepts likely sounded as foreign and unlikely to Esther at the time, like someone telling us today they are close to discovering how to make your favourite food appear if you close your eyes and picture it intently [sidenote: if anyone reading this is close to doing so, do please let me know!].

What Nasir Ahmed was describing, is the mechanism behind video calling. Also known as FaceTime or Zoom.

From being born in India to birthing a new idea

Nasir was born in India in the 1940s. He was raised there, obtained his bachelor’s degree in engineering, before moving to the States to get his Masters and Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the 1960s.

After working in the industry for a couple of years, Nasir joined the Kansas State University as a Professor. Later on in the 1980s, he moved back to his alum mater for the rest of his teaching career.

Two things were happening at the time which led to Nasir’s life-changing discoveries.

First: a significant amount of research across universities was taking place relating to the transition of data signals; how signals are transmitted, how to preserve their energy when doing so, making the signal transmission more efficient.

Second: the foundation of what we know today as the Internet was being laid out. Scientists were starting to look into, and experiment with, connecting computers and forming data networks.

With those two pieces of information [and of course many others], Nasir started to think of how to transmit images, or videos, across devices.

Acceleration of the idea — and its transmission

Nasir spent time with his team researching signal transmission and data compression, two concepts behind moving a signal from point A to point B. His challenge was trying to do so in a more efficient method than used at the time.

This is when he came up with the Discrete Cosine Transform (“DCT”). In very basic terms, he found a method of transmission which used less energy, discovering that the cosine function uses fewer iterations than the sine function then used.

Sound ‘simple’? That’s what everyone thought so then too.

When he submitted his proposal to the National Science Foundation, it was rejected for being too simple.

From there, he employed the help of a friend from another university. They spent the entire summer post the rejection working through and testing their theory, and still found the same surprising results.

The results were too good to be true. — Nasir Ahmed.

Yet again, they took another route. Nasir and his team attended a conference later in the year to run the results by another scientist, who helped them put the equation to practice with some of his computer programs.

At that point, there was no denying it anymore. This must be correct, and Nasir’s findings were published. The rest is history.

Luckily for all of us, he persevered and got his idea through.

Today, it is the standard behind basically any image data we send and receive.

From 1973 to 2020

Since then, DCT was used as a basis for almost anything image-related you can think of. Photos, DVDs, digital cameras, video calling, high-def TVs. He is even credited with the .jpg image format.

Just imagine everything his hard work has given us pre 2020.

Then try to picture [pun intended] our 2020 if Nasir did not exist, or if his work did not get the recognition it deserved. Every meeting we had on Zoom would not have existed, every birthday or event we celebrated over FaceTime, every video call we had when we were feeling down or alone, every Instagram or TikTok story that lifted our spirits or put a smile on our face. None of this would have been possible without Nasir.

The impact of his work truly could not be understated.

Little did we realize at the time that the resulting DCT would be widely used in the future — Nasir Ahmed, 1991

I’d say, little did Nasir Ahmed realize just how widely it would be used.