Erdal Arıkan

Erdal Arıkan (b. 1958) is a Turkish professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Bilkent University. Arıkan received the IEEE WRG Baker Award, particularly for his development of and contributions to polar coding in information theory in 2013. In December 2017 he was honored with the 2018 Richard W. Hamming Medal. In June 2018 he received the Shannon Award.

Education

In 1981 Arıkan received his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology. He completed his master's and doctorate. In 1982 and 1985 he carried out studies on Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Academic background

Before returning to Turkey, Arıkan served as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1987 he joined Bilkent University as a faculty member.

In 2008 Arıkan invented polar codes, a coding system that established a mathematical basis for solving Shannon's channel-capacity problem. A three-session lecture on the subject, given in January 2015 at the Simons Institute's Information Theory Boot Camp at the University of California, Berkeley, is available on YouTube. The lecture is also featured on the Simons Institute web page, which contains the slides Arıkan used in his presentation.

Arıkan is an IEEE member and was chosen as an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for 2014–2015.

Awards

In 2010 Arıkan received the IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award (archived on the Wayback Machine on 11 May 2012) and the Sedat Simavi Science Award, for the solution of a problem concerning the construction of coding schemes that send information at a rate closer to the capacity of communication channels. This problem had remained unsolved in the field of information theory since 1948, the year it was founded by Claude Shannon. In 2011 Arıkan was deemed worthy of the Kadir Has Achievement Award for the same accomplishment. In 2012 he was elected a member of IEEE.

In 2013 he received the IEEE WRG Baker Award for his work in the field of polar coding.

In 2018 Arıkan earned the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Award "for contributions to information and communication theory, in particular the discovery of polar codes and polarization techniques." In the same year it was announced that he would be honored with the 2019 Claude E. Shannon Award.

In July 2018 Huawei gave Arıkan a special award recognizing "his extraordinary contribution to the development of communication technology." The medal symbolizes "the importance of new communication technology in moving the world forward." In his speech there, Arıkan said, "As an engineer, there is no greater reward than seeing our ideas turn into reality."

Sources

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