Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Recent Award for Network Coding

I opened the January issue of IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and saw (what is probably old news to everyone) that Tracey Ho, Muriel Medard, Ralf Kotter, David Karger, Michelle Effros, Jun Shi, and Ben Leong have won the IEEE Communications Society and Information Society Joint paper award for their work A Random Linear Network Coding Approach to Multicast. Congratulations! Always nice to see coding work being recognized, and a "computer scientist" (Karger) winning a "EE" award for work on coding.

Sadly, it's also time to recall the passing of Ralf Kotter, who died of cancer just over a year ago. Communications Theory lost a brilliant mind and a great leader far, far too early.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was completely unaware of him being unwell, and had hoped to do a postdoc with him at some point. Have heard that not only was he a great mind, but he was excellent at grooming students. Though I couldnt work with him, shall always draw inspiration from his work. Really a big loss, makes me sad each time I read about it.