EEE Faculty member Prof. Erdal Arıkan has received the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award.
The ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award honors specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing. Prof. Erdal Arıkan received this award for the discovery of channel polarization and the construction of polar codes, the first explicit, capacity-achieving codes with efficient encoding and decoding adopted in global wireless standards.
In his foundational 2009 paper, Arıkan solved a fundamental open problem in information theory that had persisted since Claude Shannon’s 1948 work. He introduced a method that transforms independent noisy channels into synthesized channels that are either essentially noise-free or completely noisy.
Detailed information about the Association for Computing Machinery can be found at https://www.acm.org/. The official ACM press release announcing the Technical Excellence Awards is available at https://awards.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/press-releases/2026/may/technical-awards-2025.pdf. ACM will present these and other awards at its annual Awards Banquet on June 13 in San Francisco.