AWARDS

Kees A. Schouhamer Immink elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Kees A. Schouhamer Immink, an active member and current governor of the IT Society, was by, royal decree, elected to life membership in the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Immink was born in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in 1946. He received the M.S. and Ph.D degrees from the Eindhoven University of Technology. He joined the Philips' Research Laboratories, Eindhoven, in 1968, where he currently holds the position of Research Fellow. He has contributed to the design and development of a variety of digital consumer-type audio and video recorders such as the Compact Disc, Compact Disc Video, R-DAT, DCC, and DVD. Immink holds 30 US patents and has written numerous papers in the field of coding techniques for optical and magnetic recorders. He is author of Coding Techniques for Digital Recorders and co-author of Principles of Optical Disc Systems and Reed Solomon Codes: Theory and Application. He is the chairman of the IEEE Benelux Chapter on Consumer Electronics, governor of the AES and the IEEE Information Theory Society. He was named a Fellow of the AES, IEE, and IEEE; furthermore he received the AES Silver Medal in 1992, the IEE Sir J.J. Thomson Medal in 1993, the SMPTE Poniatoff Gold Medal for Technical Excellence in 1994, and the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award in 1996.
The Royal Academy, founded in 1808, covers the entire field of learning. It's functions are briefly: advisory body of the Dutch government in all fields of science, the furtherance of science and technology and to their use for the general welfare, and management of institutes of fundamental research.
Members and foreign associates of the Royal Academy are elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research; election to the Royal Academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a scientist or engineer. The Royal Academy membership is comprised of 200 members.

Mark Pinsker to Receive IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal
Dr. Mark S. Pinsker, Professor, Institute for Information Transmission Problems, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, will be honored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest technical professional society, at its annual Honors Ceremony on 22 June in Montreal, Quebec.
Dr. Pinsker will receive the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal for outstanding contributions to information theory, statistical estimation and coding theory.
His best known contributions are related to the nonparametric estimation problems where he proposed an optimal estimator significantly affecting the statistical community. He was also one of the first to give precise formulations of complexity problems in coding theory, and contributed to the theory of communications networks where he introduced the concept of expander (or concentrator) graphs.
Dr. Pinsker's monograph "Information and Information Stability of Random Variable and Processes" was, for 30 years, the only comprehensive mathematical treatment of information theory not restricted to discrete alphabets and/or time.
Dr. Pinsker began his scientific career in the 1950s studying stochastic processes and dynamical systems. He introduced the maximal partition of dynamical system with zero entropy which later became known as Pinsker's partition and played a key role in the entropy theory of dynamical systems. One of his most recent research topics is models of storage devices called channels with defects and channels with localized errors. He extensively investigated the coding problems for these channels using combinational and probabilistic approaches.
He graduated from the Moscow State University and received a doctoral degree from Leningrad University. He joined the Institute for Problems of Information Transmission (IPIT) in 1955. He became head of the IPIT Laboratory in 1962 and since 1990 has been both principal scientist and professor.
Dr. Pinsker has published 90 papers in journals and books. He has received a number of awards, including the Claude E. Shannon Award.