The Rome Science Hall of Fame will present Dr. Andrew L. Drozd and Zbigniew “Ziggy” L. Pankowicz with Lifetime Achievement Awards in a ceremony on Tuesday, June 11 at 6 p.m. at the Delta Lake Inn. The ceremony is open to the public, and admission costs $25 per person.

Dr. Andrew L. Drozd is the founder of Andro Computational Solutions in Rome, and performs consulting, research and development of expert system solutions in the areas of electromagnetic environmental effects, spectrum management, radar systems, target recognition, data fusion and image registration.

Drozd has been chair of the Mohawk Valley Chapter of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), and his company was recognized by that chapter in 2014 as Engineering Company of the Year, by the Business Journal News Network in 2014 with a Workplace Wellness Award, and most recently by the Small Business Administration.

He also founded Project Fibonacci, which provides immersive learning programs on STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and math) topics in cooperation with local schools, businesses and non-profit organizations.

Drozd was born in Belgium and was raised in Rome, graduating from Rome Catholic High School in 1974. He graduated from Syracuse University with a bachelor’s degree in physics and math in 1977, and earned his master’s in electrical engineering in 1982.

Zbigniew “Ziggy” Pankowicz was born in Poland in 1922 and fought to resist Nazi occupation during World War II.

He was captured by the Gestapo in 1943, and was transferred to Auschwitz, where his captors discovered that he had training in microbiology and transferred him to Buchenwald to work in the lab, helping to develop a vaccine for black typhus.

All of Pankowicz’s family died in concentration camps, and his sister was executed in Hungary while helping Allied pilots escape back to their units.

Pankowicz came to the Rome Air Development Center (RADC) in the mid-1960s with an idea to translate Russian into English using computers. Language translation was a “brand new” upcoming R&D technology area with few solutions at that time, and Pankowicz foresaw upcoming advances in linguistic theory with computer capabilities to make his vision a reality. He served as program manager to build the first ever Russian to English Translator. The Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson AFB was the first operational customer.

Pankowicz died in 1986 at the age of 64. He was a charter member of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

His computer-based solution enabled the translation of Russian scientific text into English with some post-processing in hours, a process that took human translators weeks or even months. His approach provided an inexpensive, fast and highly useful translations of scientific literature which were far superior to human translation. Virtually the entire world of machine translation cited his foresight and vision.

One of Pankowicz’s greatness achievements was the translation of a Russian scientific journal which described the early outlines of stealth technology. This lead to the development of the nation’s first operational F-117A Nighthawk fighter.

Pankowicz also headed a program to translate Chinese to English using machine translation. He laid the groundwork for computational Linguistics, a branch of what is now known as artificial intelligence.

The Rome Science Hall of Fame will also award nine Rome Free Academy students the Upcoming Science Achievement award, given to graduating seniors who have achieved at least a 93 percent GPA in the sciences and at least a 93 percent GPA overall.