The IEEE Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award is given annually to the author(s) of outstanding papers, relevant to both societies, published in any publication of either society during the previous three calendar years. The 2010 award goes to the following paper:

Ralf Koetter and Frank R. Kschischang , “ Coding for Errors and Erasures in Random Network Coding ,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 54, no. 8, pp. 3579–3591, August 2008.

Ralf Koetter received a Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University Darmstadt, Germany in 1990 and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Linköping University, Sweden. He held positions at the IBM Almaden Research Laboratory, San Jose, CA, and at CNRS in Sophia-Antipolis, France. From 1999 to 2006 he was faculty member at UIUC, and in 2006 became Head of the Institute for Communications Engineering at the Technical University of Munich. Dr. Koetter’s research interests included coding and information theory and their application to communication systems.
Dr. Koetter received an IBM Invention Achievement Award in 1997, an NSF CAREER Award in 2000, an IBM Partnership Award in 2001, and a 2006 XEROX award for faculty research. He was co-recipient of the 2004 IT Society Best Paper Award, of the 2004 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award, and of the 2009 IEEE ComSoc/ITSoc Joint Paper Award. He received the Vodafone Innovationspreis in 2008. From 2003 to 2008 he was a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society. 
Ralf Koetter passed away in February, 2009.

Frank R. Kschischang received the B.A.Sc. degree (with honors) from the University of British Columbia in 1985 and the M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Toronto in 1988 and 1991, respectively, all in electrical engineering. He is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, where he has been a faculty member since 1991. His research interests are focused primarily on the area of channel coding techniques, applied to wireline, wireless and optical communication systems and networks.
Dr. Kschischang received the Ontario Premier’s Excellence Research Award in 1999, a Tier I Canada Research Chair in 2001 (renewed in 2008), and a Killam Research Fellowship in 2010. He serves currently as the 2010 President of the IEEE Information Theory Society.