The purpose of the Information Theory Paper Award is to recognize exceptional publications in the field and to stimulate interest in and encourage contributions to fields of interest of the Society. The 2011 IEEE Information Theory Paper award is presented to

M. Hayashi , " Information-Spectrum Approach to Second-Order Coding Rate in Channel Coding ", IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, vol. 55, no. 11, pp 4947 - 4966, Nov. 2009

and

Y. Polyanskiy , H. V. Poor , and S. Verdu , " Channel coding rate in the finite blocklength regime ", IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, vol. 56, no. 5, pp 2307 - 2359, May 2010

Masahito Hayashi received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mathematics from Kyoto University, Japan, in 1996 and 1999, respectively. He worked in Kyoto University as a Research Fellow of the Japan Society of the Promotion of Science (JSPS) from 1998 to 2000, and worked in the Laboratory for Mathematical Neuroscience, Brain Science Institute, RIKEN from 2000 to 2003, and worked in ERATO Quantum Computation and Information Project, Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) as the Research Head from 2000 to 2006. He also worked in the Superrobust Computation Project Information Science and Technology Strategic Core (21st Century COE by MEXT) Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo as Adjunct Associate Professor from 2004 to 2007. In 2006, he published the book "Quantum Information: An Introduction'' from Springer. In 2007, he joined the Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University as Associate Professor. He also worked in Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore as Visiting Research Associate Professor from 2009.

Yury Polyanskiy is a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, advised by Prof. H. Vincent Poor and Prof. Sergio Verdu. His main interests are information theory, channel coding and modulation.  He received B.S. (2003, with honors) and M.S. (2005, with honors) in applied mathematics and physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Department of General and Applied Physics. His awards include Silver Medal at IPhO (1999), Best Student Paper Award at ISIT (2008), Princeton University Dodds Honorific Fellowship (2009).

H. Vincent Poor received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, in 1977.
From 1977 until 1990, he was on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 1990, he has been on the faculty at Princeton University, where he is the Dean of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Michael Henry Strater University Professor of Electrical Engineering. His research interests are in the areas of stochastic analysis, statistical signal processing, and information theory, and their applications in wireless networks and related fields. Among his publications in these areas are the recent books Quickest Detection (Cambridge University Press, 2009), coauthored with O. Hadjiliadis and Information Theoretic Security (Now Publishers, 2009), coauthored with Y. Liang and S. Shamai.
Dr. Poor is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering of the U.K. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the Optical Society of America, and other organizations. In 1990, he served as President of the IEEE Information Theory Society, and in 2004–2007 as the Editor-in-Chief of these TRANSACTIONS. He was the recipient of the 2005 IEEE Education Medal. Recent recognition of his work includes the 2007 Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the 2008 Aaron D. Wyner Distinguished Service Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society, and the 2009 Edwin Howard Armstrong Achievement Award of the IEEE Communications Society.

Sergio Verdú  received the Telecommunications Engineering degree from the Universitat Politècnica de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, in 1980 and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, in 1984.
Since 1984, he has been a member of the faculty of Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, where he is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering.
Dr. Verdú is the recipient of the 2007 Claude E. Shannon Award and the 2008 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and was awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in 2005. He is a recipient of several paper awards from the IEEE: the 1992 Donald Fink Paper Award, the 1998 Information Theory Outstanding Paper Award, an Information Theory Golden Jubilee Paper Award, the 2002 Leonard Abraham Prize Award, the 2006 Joint Communications/Information Theory Paper Award, and the 2009 Stephen O. Rice Prize from IEEE Communications Society. He has also received paper awards from the Japanese Telecommunications Advancement Foundation and from Eurasip. He received the 2000 Frederick E. Terman Award from the American Society for Engineering Education for his book Multiuser Detection (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998). He served as President of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 1997. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory.