Dr. Georg Böcherer of the Chair of Communications Engineering of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) is the recipient of the Johann-Philipp-Reis Award of the Information Technology Society (ITG) of the German Association of Electrical Engineering, Electronics, and Information Technology e.V. (VDE).
The award is given to engineers up to the age of 40 who have published an outstanding, innovative work in the field of communications that is expected to have an impact on the economy.
The work being recognized is "Bandwidth Efficient and Rate-Matched Low-Density Parity-Check Coded Modulation" published in the IEEE Transactions on Communications in December 2015. This paper introduces a new layered architecture for coded modulation. The paper further develops information theory that proves that the architecture achieves Shannon capacity with unprecedented flexibility. Dr. Böcherer's work has received tremendous interest from the optical fiber community, including post-deadline papers and special sessions at the world's most influential optical communications conferences (OFC, ECOC). Moreover, Nokia Bell Labs and Facebook have performed field trials with live traffic that verified the architecture's performance, and that demonstrated its agility.
Johann Philipp Reis was born in 1834 in Gelnhausen and died in 1874 in Friedrichsdorf. He constructed the first device for sound transmission, the telephone. On October 26, 1861, he introduced the device for the first time in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
The Johann-Philipp-Reis Award has been given biannually since 1986 by the VDE, the cities of Friedrichsdorf in the Taunus and Gelnhausen, and the Deutsche Telekom. The award is accompanied by a cash prize of 10.000 euro. For more information, please see this link.