Prof. Erdal Arıkan, faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, 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. Arıkan received the 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 2009 paper, Prof. 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.
ACM presented these and other awards at its annual Awards Banquet on June 13, 2026 in San Francisco.
