Erdal Arıkan

Erdal Arıkan (born 1958) is a Turkish professor in Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. In 2013, Arıkan received IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award for his contributions to polar codes.

Education

He received his Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA in 1981. He finished his M.S. and Ph.D. studies in Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, in 1982 and 1985, respectively.

Academic background

Arıkan served as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before returning to Turkey. He joined Bilkent University as a faculty member in 1987.

In 2008 Arıkan invented polar codes, a system of coding that provides a mathematical basis for the solution of Shannon's channel capacity problem. A three-session lecture on the matter given in January 2015 at Simons Institute's Information Theory Boot Camp at the University of California, Berkeley is available on YouTube. The lecture is also featured on Simons Institute's own webpage, which also includes the slides used by Arikan in his presentation.

Arikan is an IEEE Fellow, and was chosen as an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for 2014-2015.

Awards

In 2010, Arıkan received the IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award and the Sedat Simavi Science Award for solving a problem related to the construction of coding schemes that send information at a rate better suited to the capacity of communication channels. The problem had remained unresolved ever since the field of information theory was first established by Claude Shannon in 1948. Arıkan became the recipient for the Kadir Has Achievement Award in 2011 for the same accomplishment.

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