Erdal Arıkan (born 1958) is a Turkish professor in

Electrical and Electronics Engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

Department at

Bilkent University Bilkent University () is a private non-profit research university located in Ankara, Turkey. It was founded by İhsan Doğramacı, the first president of the Council of Higher Education and the head of the prominent Doğramacı family, with th ...

Ankara Ankara is the capital city of Turkey and List of national capitals by area, the largest capital by area in the world. Located in the Central Anatolia Region, central part of Anatolia, the city has a population of 5,290,822 in its urban center ( ...

Turkey Turkey, officially the Republic of Türkiye, is a country mainly located in Anatolia in West Asia, with a relatively small part called East Thrace in Southeast Europe. It borders the Black Sea to the north; Georgia (country), Georgia, Armen ...

. He is known for his invention of polar codes, which is a key component of 5G technologies.

Early life and education

The son of a doctor and a homemaker, Erdal Arikan was born in 1958 and grew up in Turkey. He attended the

Middle East Technical University Middle East Technical University (commonly referred to as METU; in Turkish language, Turkish, ''Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi'', ODTÜ) is a prestigious public university, public Institute of technology, technical university located in Ankara, ...

to study

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

, but transferred to

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

in the middle of his freshman year as a result of

political violence in Turkey Politics () is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources. The branch of social science that studies poli ...

. He started graduate studies at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

in 1981 where he was advised by

Robert G. Gallager Robert Gray Gallager (born May 29, 1931) is an American electrical engineer known for his work on information theory and communications networks. Gallager was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 1979 for contributi ...

and obtained his PhD in 1986.

Career

Academic background

Arıkan briefly served as a tenure-track assistant professor at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. Established in 1867, it is the f ...

. He joined

as a faculty member in 1987. Arıkan developed polar codes, a system of coding that provides a mathematical basis for the solution of Shannon's channel capacity problem. He presented a three-session lecture on the polar codes at

Simons Institute The Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley is an institute for collaborative research in theoretical computer science. History Established on July 1, 2012 with a grant of $60 million from the Simon ...

's Information Theory Boot Camp at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

. The lecture is also featured on the Simons Institute webpage, which includes the slides used by Arıkan in his presentation. Arıkan is an IEEE Fellow (Class of 2012), and was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for 2014–2015.

Awards

Arıkan received th
IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award
in 2010, and the Sedat Simavi Science Award for the construction of new channel coding schemes. Arıkan became the recipient of the Kadir Has Achievement Award in 2011 for the same accomplishment. He was named an IEEE fellow in 2012. Arıkan received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Award in 2018 "for contributions to information and communications theory, especially the discovery of polar codes and polarization techniques." The same year, it was announced that he would be honored with the 2019

Claude E. Shannon Award The Claude E. Shannon Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society was created to honor consistent and profound contributions to the field of information theory. Each Shannon Award winner is expected to present a Shannon Lecture at the following ...

. The Chinese telecommunications company

Huawei Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. ("Huawei" sometimes stylized as "HUAWEI"; ; zh, c=华为, p= ) is a Chinese multinational corporationtechnology company in Longgang, Shenzhen, Longgang, Shenzhen, Guangdong. Its main product lines include teleco ...

recognized his "outstanding contribution to the development of communications technology in 2018."

Students

The list of Ph.D. dissertations completed under the supervision of Erdal Arıkan: * Akar, Nail – ''Performance analysis of an asynchronous transfer mode multiplexer with Markov modulated inputs'' (1993) * Abdelati, Mohamed – ''A framework for handling connectionless services in ATM networks'' (1997) * Tan, A Serdar – ''Error resilient stereoscopic video streaming using model-based fountain codes'' (2009) * Önay, Saygun – ''Polar codes for distributed source coding'' (2014) * Dizdar, Onur – ''High throughput decoding methods and architectures for polar codes with high energy-efficiency and low latency'' (2017-11) * Moradi, Mohsen – ''Performance and computational analysis of polarization-adjusted convolutional (PAC) codes'' (2022-06) * Hokmabadi, Amir Mozammel – ''Hardware implementation of Fano Decoder for polarization-adjusted convolutional (PAC) codes'' (2022-06)

References

Sources

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Arikan, Erdal academic staff of Bilkent University California Institute of Technology alumni Fellows of the IEEE Living people MIT School of Engineering alumni Turkish electrical engineers Turkish mathematicians 1958 births