Arya Mazumdar wins information theory student paper prize

Congratulations to ECE/ISR Ph.D. student Arya Mazumdar, who received a student paper award at the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory.

Mazumdar won the prize for his paper, “Codes in Permutations and Error Correction for Rank Modulation,” co-written with his advisor, Professor Alexander Barg (ECE/ISR).

Dr. Barg notes that the prize “arguably represents some of the best student work in the field of information theory worldwide during the last year.”

A total of five ECE/ISR students, including Mazumdar, were among the 44 finalists worldwide, based on the technical content of their papers. The other four were:

Ersen Ekrem (joint work with Sennur Ulukus)
Punarbasu Purkayastha (joint work with Alexander Barg)
Himanshu Tyagi (joint work with Piyush Gupta and Prakash Narayan)
Sirin Nitinawarat (for his sole-authored work; he is advised by Prakash Narayan)

Professor Narayan says, "Having seen the work of our five ECE/ISR students, I can say that their papers are all in the same superb league."

The Information Theory Society Student Paper Award is a major award that recognizes outstanding papers presented by a student author at the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, the largest conference in the area of information and coding theory. The award is given on the basis of both the technical content of the paper and the quality of the presentation, and the student must be the primary contributor to the paper. Mazumdar was one of five prizewinners for 2010, out of a field of several hundred entries.

Published September 11, 2010