Sept. 19 – Marco Dalai is assistant professor in Telecommunications within the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Brescia. Born in Manerbio, a small municipality in the province of Brescia in 1979, Dalai’s paper on “Lower bounds on the probability of error for classical and classical-quantum channels” won the 2014 edition of the Information Theory Society Paper Award, associated with a cash prize of $1,000. The prestigious award has been awarded annually since 1962 to original publications that appeared in the previous two years; the goal is to stimulate debate and encourage scientific research applications for the advancement of society. “Dalai is the second Italian to win the award, after Andrew James Viterbi (1968), whose algorithm is used in digital broadcasts, and it is essential for GSM data transmission, for telemetry systems such as those that allowed the launch of the Explorer and CDMA satellites, and standard UMTS the transmission – says Professor Emilio Sardini, Director of the Department of Information Engineering. Dalai has entered the exclusive club of award winners, which in the past went to Tao (Fields Medal in 2006), Ungerboeck, Lovász, Lempel and Ziv (the precursors of file compression), Wyner, Gray, Slepian and Wolf, Cover, and Huffman (inventor of the encoding method used to compress JPEG and MP3 files). “The Information Theory Society is one of several technical societies of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers – IEEE. This international organization focuses on processing, transmitting, storing, and using information and the foundations of the communication process. In particular, it covers specific theoretical aspects of encryption application, communication and communication networks, cryptography complexity, detection and estimation, Claude Shannon theory (founder of information theory and the word “bit”), and random processes.
