Barg honored with 2024 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has announced that Professor Alexander Barg (ECE/ISR) is the 2024 recipient of its Richard W. Hamming Medal “for contributions to the theory of error-correcting codes and their applications in distributed storage, non-volatile memory, and digital fingerprinting.”

The Richard W. Hamming Medal, established in 1986, is the highest IEEE-wide award for exceptional contributions to information sciences, systems and technology. It honors Dr. Richard W. Hamming, who had a central role in the development of computer and computing science, and whose many significant contributions in the area of information science include his error-correcting codes. The medal is sponsored by Qualcomm.

The medal is given annually to an individual or to teams of up to three members for exceptional contributions to information sciences, systems and technology. The scope includes information transmission, coding, storage, and recovery. Subject areas include information theory, coding theory, data communication, computer networks, data storage and retrieval, and image and speech understanding.

Barg is one of 42 recipients of the medal since its establishment. He will be honored on May 3, 2024, at the IEEE Honors Ceremony in Boston.

His current research projects include NSF funding for “Quantum LDPC codes: structure and logical operations” (2023), “Coding-theoretic methods in discrepancy and energy optimization, with applications” (2021), and “From Storage Codes to Recoverable Systems” (2021).

Barg was elected a Fellow of IEEE in 2007. Previously, he won the IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award in 2015 and the IEEE Communications Society Data Storage Committee Best Paper Award (with Min Ye) in 2017.

Published November 30, 2023