Prof. Erdal Arıkan Receives 2010 IEEE Information Theory Paper Award
The 2010 IEEE Information Theory Paper Award was presented to Professor Erdal Arıkan ın the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering. The purpose of the Information Theory Paper Award is to recognize exceptional publications in the field and to stimulate interest in and encourage contributions to fields of interest of the Information Theory Society of the IEEE. The 2010 IEEE Information Theory Paper is Prof. Arıkan’s “Channel Polarization: A Method for Constructing Capacity-Achieving Codes for Symmetric Binary-Input Memoryless Channels,” published in the July 2009 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.
Information theory is a discipline founded by the American mathematician and engineer Claude E. Shannon in a seminal paper published in 1948. In his paper, Shannon gave a formula for computing the highest possible rate at which information can be transmitted reliably across a noisy communication channel but did not provide an explicit method for doing so. Finding practical methods for achieving the Shannon Limit has kept researchers busy ever since. Eventually, in the early 1990s, capacity-achieving codes were discovered but these codes defied rigorous theoretical analysis. Arıkan’s paper presents the first class of codes that have low-complexity and are also optimal in a mathematically provable sense.
The significance of Arıkan’s codes for practical applications is the subject of ongoing research.