RIP Dr Ashjaee. We really missed you..!
Sad news.?ÿ He was a brilliant man.
Shocking news for me, a great man, and a pioneer in GNSS.?ÿ I feel fortunate to have worked with him in the early development years and considered him a friend.?ÿ Peace and condolences to his family, friends, and peers.?ÿ
Truely a loss for the whole surveying community, whether they are JAVAD GNSS customers or not. ?ÿ
It was remarkable that an ordinary surveyor such as myself could send a note, and get a reply from the father of surveying GPS.
I think he strived every day to improve the surveying profession.
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COVID finally hits home - RIP my friend.
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http://www.javad.com/jgnss/javad/news/pr20200531.html ?ÿ
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https://insidegnss.com/javad-ashjaee-1949-2020/ ?ÿ
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https://www.geospatialworld.net/news/dr-javad-ashjaee-founder-of-javad-gnss-passed-away-in-moscow/
We're still in shock. There is a lot I could say, but it's hard to figure out what the most important thing is, or the best memory or story. There were quite a few. I first met him in June of 2013 in San Jose. I never expected it to be the foundation of such a meaningful relationship, but in October of that year my wife and I went to Moscow to meet his team. We sat at a long boardroom table and spent five days laying out the initial strategy for the Triumph-LS software. (Javad was an awesome host and sent my wife all over Moscow while I "worked"). He always had an unwavering confidence that he could bring something better to the market than what existed, so he insisted he develop his own software instead of importing software from a third party.
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I kept telling my wife that this consulting arrangement would not last forever, but I continued testing and making recommendations and he and his team were always so good to hear me out even if on occasion they would reject or table my advice. Javad added more surveyors to the team and we've slowly moved from consulting to support to sales. Still doing a bit of all of it but with emphasis changing somewhat along the way. We had almost weekly conference calls with the team in Moscow to discuss product development. Javad loved debate. He would often throw out a piece of red meat just to have something to argue, always with a sly grin.
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The time in Moscow was a part of an ongoing transformation for me. I love America. It's the greatest country in the world, but I have met people from all over the planet and visited several countries. You know, most people want to live and raise their families and see the world become a little better than they found it. There are some exceptions, but people are generally good. As a youngster we would have drills for nuclear attacks. The USSR was a villain. I have no love for communism still, but the people of Russia are great and spending time there sitting with them in a boardroom talking about one of my favorite subjects in the world: surveying, was surreal. This was part of Javad's vision when he approached the Russians in the late eighties to develop a receiver that would track GPS and Glonass - it was not just a technological achievement but a humanitarian one as well. That vision continues to ripple today. I have friends I speak with in Russia routinely.?ÿ
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On top of selling his equipment, I use it everyday too. Almost every button is a story to me. Each button represents a conversation, sometimes a debate (on rare occasion a heated debate), and each button represents people - a person in need of some feature or application and another who responded to that need and wrote some lines of code to meet it. Almost every application has a face, and that face has a name, and a family, and hobbies. It's been quite an experience. Javad and I spent time at his home, in his backyard in San Jose, on a cool fall day and he explained how a choke-ring antenna works, he was ever the professor. ("How did I get here?" I kept thinking).?ÿ
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Javad taught me a lot, and not only about GPS theory, but about being bold and taking risks. He was a great mentor to me and I have so many great stories. I'm humbled, so very humbled, that he saw something in me worth listening to, a dirt surveyor with three semesters of junior college. But I can say that Javad loved surveyors. I don't know why he loved surveyors but he did. He chose to make his career about bringing innovation to our profession and I can honestly say that profit was never his chief priority. It was, in his words, about having fun and making great products. He never took a vacation, because to him his work with his team was always a vacation.
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thanks for sharing that.
I sincerely hope that his dreams, and business continue for many years to come.
PS: I had retired before he rose to prominence. If I had stayed in the game I am sure I would have been using his products.
@shawn-billings that is a beautiful, heart-felt tribute. Very well done, and thank you for sharing this.
Very sad news.
I heard this today.
Even the GIS community has lost a giant in how we use our handhelds, and the math, like EVEREST Technology, for rejecting poor signals in the places we had to work.?ÿ RIP Javad.
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Javad Ashjaee, 1949-2020
By: Alan Cameron
Inside GNSS
31 May 2020
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A great man has left us, left the international GNSS community. Dr. Javad Ashjaee passed away in Moscow on May 30 from the corona virus illness, a family member reported on social media.
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A giant in GPS receiver development and then a pioneer in combined GPS/GLONASS receivers, he added Galileo, BeiDou and QZSS to his lines of high-precision equipment as soon as their signals became available.
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Born in Iran, he studied in the U.S., obtaining a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Iowa University. He returned to Iran in the 1970s to teach at Teheran University, but left the country following the 1978 revolution. He began his GPS career at Trimble Navigation, where he first worked on Loran-C receivers.
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In 1983, he co-pioneered high precision GPS by introducing the Trimble 4000-S, a 4-channel geodetic receiver, writing its entire software. It was the first commercial geodetic GPS receiver and no one can deny that it changed the survey industry irrevocably.
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He left Trimble to found Ashtech, where he rolled out several product lines constituting the first portable geodetic survey receivers, the L-12, the M-12 and the Z-12. He was the first to integrate GLONASS signals with GPS in commercial receivers. He sold Ashtech and founded Javad Positioning Systems, eventually selling that as well, founding Javad Navigation Systems and finally JAVAD GNSS in 2007. The company headquartered in San Jose, California, with a substantial R&D office in Moscow, where Javad increasingly spent most of his time.
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In 2006 he was among the earliest supporters of Inside GNSS magazine.
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One of those figures universally known by his first name rather than his last, he was truly a legend in his own time. I had the opportunity to work closely with him on several significant projects, and to incur his wrath on a few others. The most important of the first group was editing and publishing his personal history of ??how GPS and GLONASS got together,? largely at his instigation, convening meetings of key U.S. and Russian government officials in his Moscow apartment.
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A second unforgettable one was his moving tribute to his friend and mentor Charlie Trimble, given at an industry gathering in Fort Worth in 2006. The story is part of Javad lore. Newly arrived in the U.S. with not a penny to his name, sleeping on a couch in his brother??s apartment, on a Thursday he saw a job posting at Trimble Navigation. He mailed his resume on Friday, received a phone call on Monday morning, was at the Trimble office within an hour ?? and did not leave that day. He started work that afternoon.
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And he never, ever, stopped working. GPS, then GNSS, were truly in his blood.
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Javad, we will miss you. You were taken too soon.
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He is the mastermind of Survey Grade GPS.
He made a huge contribution to society. Only us Surveyor really know what that meant to the world.
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I am going to miss the innovations of this guy!?ÿ Truly an out of the box thinker.?ÿ I never had the opportunity to meet him, which makes me sad.?ÿ We will just have to remember him through his exceedingly long list of accomplishment.
His name will be carried on throughout the fields, mountains and hollers in WV. ?ÿSad news, he made great contributions to the profession. ?ÿ
That really sucks.....
Requiescat in pace Dr Javad, your contributions paved our way and benefited the world deeply.
A very kind man.
I had the luxury of meeting Mr. Ashjaee at an ACSM conference (remember those?) in Las Vegas. He was very kind, very smart, and very giving of his knowledge. He was excited about his products and happy to spend time showing you how they worked, even if he knew you weren't a potential customer. I have always hoped I'd have another opportunity to speak with him, but alas, that time will never come. But I'm appreciative to have had the opportunity to meet and carry on an interesting conversation with him.
RIP Mr. Ashjaee.
Mark Silver introduced me to him at Intergeo 2018. I haven't got any of his gear but the enthousiasm in which he spoke about it definitely had one's attention. He saw everything big, their stand was one of the largest on the trade show.
I've read about him in the past and his contribution to the GNSS community is immense.
