The Marconi Prize | |
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Awarded for | Exceptional contributions to the field of information and communication technology for the benefit of mankind. |
Presented by | Marconi Society |
First awarded | 1975 |
Website | https://www.marconisociety.org/ |
The Marconi Prize is an annual award recognizing achievements and advancements made in field of communications (radio, mobile, wireless, telecommunications, data communications, networks, and Internet). The prize is awarded by the Marconi Society and it includes a work of sculpture. Recipients of the prize are awarded at the Marconi Society's annual symposium and gala.
Occasionally, the Marconi Society Lifetime Achievement Award is bestowed on legendary late-career individuals, recognizing their transformative contributions and remarkable impacts to the field of communications and to the development of the careers of students, colleagues and peers, throughout their lifetimes. [1] So far, the recipients include Claude E. Shannon (2000, died in 2001), William O. Baker (2003, died in 2005), Gordon E. Moore (2005), Amos E. Joel Jr. (2009, died in 2008), Robert W. Galvin (2011, died in 2011), Thomas Kailath (2017) and Vint Cerf (2023). [1]
The Marconi Prize is awarded based on the candidate’s contributions in the following areas:
The Marconi Prize winners are also named as Marconi Fellows. [3] The foundation and the prize are named after the honor of Guglielmo Marconi, a Nobel laureate and one of the pioneers of radio communications. Recipients of the Marconi Prize are also expected to pursue further creative work to advance the understanding and development of communications technology for the benefit of mankind.
Past winners of the Marconi Prize include Lawrence E. Page and Sergey Brin for the development of web search company Google, Tim Berners-Lee for his leadership and innovations in the World Wide Web, Nobel Laureate Charles K. Kao for developing fiber-optic communications, and Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie for their work in security - the Diffie–Hellman key exchange. The first award was given in 1975.
Bell Labs is an American industrial research and development (R&D) company credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others. Ten Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.
Karl Ferdinand Braun was a German electrical engineer, inventor, physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics. Braun contributed significantly to the development of the radio, when he invented the phased array antenna in 1905, which led to the development of radar, smart antennas, MIMO and the television by building the first cathode-ray tube. Braun also built the first semiconductor.
Andrew James Viterbi is an Italian Jewish–American electrical engineer and businessman who co-founded Qualcomm Inc. and invented the Viterbi algorithm. He is the Presidential Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering, which was named in his honor in 2004 in recognition of his $52 million gift.
Martin Edward Hellman is an American cryptologist and mathematician, best known for his invention of public-key cryptography in cooperation with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle. Hellman is a longtime contributor to the computer privacy debate, and has applied risk analysis to a potential failure of nuclear deterrence.
Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie ForMemRS is an American cryptographer and mathematician and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography along with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle. Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paper New Directions in Cryptography introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, that helped solve key distribution—a fundamental problem in cryptography. Their technique became known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange. The article stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, the asymmetric key algorithms.
Paul Carl Kocher is an American cryptographer and cryptography entrepreneur who founded Cryptography Research, Inc. (CRI) and served as its president and chief scientist.
Paul Baran was an American-Jewish engineer who was a pioneer in the development of computer networks. He was one of the two independent inventors of packet switching, which is today the dominant basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide, and went on to start several companies and develop other technologies that are an essential part of modern digital communication.
Thomas Kailath is an Indian born American electrical engineer, information theorist, control engineer, entrepreneur and the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering emeritus at Stanford University. Professor Kailath has authored several books, including the well-known book Linear Systems, which ranks as one of the most referenced books in the field of linear systems.
Irwin Mark Jacobs is an American electrical engineer and businessman. He is a co-founder and former chairman of Qualcomm, and chair of the board of trustees of the Salk Institute. As of 2019, Jacobs has an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion.
Sir David Neil Payne CBE FRS FREng is a British professor of photonics who is director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton. He has made several contributions in areas of optical fibre communications over the last fifty years and his work has affected telecommunications and laser technology. Payne’s work spans diverse areas of photonics, from telecommunications and optical sensors to nanophotonics and optical materials, including the introduction of the first optical fibre drawing tower in a university.
Martin Cooper is an American engineer. He is a pioneer in the wireless communications industry, especially in radio spectrum management, with eleven patents in the field.
The Guglielmo Marconi International Fellowship Foundation, briefly called Marconi Foundation and currently known as The Marconi Society, was established by Gioia Marconi Braga in 1974 to commemorate the centennial of the birth of her father Guglielmo Marconi. The Marconi International Fellowship Council was established to honor significant contributions in science and technology, awarding the Marconi Prize and an annual $100,000 grant to a living scientist who has made advances in communication technology that benefit mankind. Although Braga died in July 1996, the Marconi Society has continued to award the annual Marconi Prize and fellowship, which were first awarded in 1975. The Marconi Society also grants annual Marconi Society-Paul Baran Young Scholar Awards to young scientists who, by the time they turn 27, have made significant contributions in the fields of communication and information science. Originally, the Foundation was located at the Aspen Institute. In 1997, it relocated, by invitation, to Columbia University's Fu School of Engineering and Applied Science. The organization currently is headquartered in northeastern Ohio, outside of Cleveland.
Gottfried Ungerboeck is an Austrian communications engineer.
Arogyaswami J. Paulraj is an Indian-American electrical engineer, academic. He is a Professor Emeritus (Research) in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.
Donald C. Cox is an American electrical engineer researching wireless communication, currently a professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he heads the Wireless Communications Research Group. His work on multipath and other propagation problems has been fundamental to the development of mobile phone technology.
Theodore (Ted) Scott Rappaport is an American electrical engineer and the David Lee/Ernst Weber Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New York University Tandon School of Engineering and founding director of NYU WIRELESS.
Mérouane Debbah is a researcher, educator and technology entrepreneur. He has founded several public and industrial research centers, start-ups and held executive positions in ICT companies. He is professor at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates and founding director of the Khalifa University 6G Research Center. His research has been at the interface of fundamental mathematics, algorithms, statistics, information and communication sciences with a special focus on random matrix theory and learning algorithms. In the communication field, he has been at the heart of the development of small cells (4G), massive MIMO (5G) and large intelligent surfaces (6G) technologies. In the AI field, he is known for his work on large language models, distributed AI systems for networks and semantic communications. He received more than 40 IEEE best-paper awards for his contributions to both fields and according to research.com is ranked as the best scientist in France in the field of electronics and electrical engineering.
Andrea Goldsmith is an American electrical engineer and the Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. She is also the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton. She was previously the Stephen Harris Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, as well as a faculty affiliate at the Stanford Neurosciences Institute. Her interests are in the design, analysis and fundamental performance limits of wireless systems and networks, and in the application of communication theory and signal processing to neuroscience. She also co-founded and served as chief technology officer of Plume WiFi and Quantenna Communications. Since 2021, she has been a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).