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 2010 IEEE Information Theory Paper award is presented to

Erdal Arikan , " Channel Polarization: A Method for Constructing Capacity-Achieving Codes for Symmetric Binary-Input Memoryless Channels ", IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, vol. 55, no. 7, pp. 3051-3073, July 2009.

Erdal Arıkan (S’84–M’79–SM’94) was born in Ankara, Turkey, in 1958. He received the B.S. degree from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, in 1981 and the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, in 1982 and 1985, respectively, all in electrical engineering.

Since 1987 he has been with the Electrical-Electronics Engineering Department of Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, where he is presently a Professor.