Eitan Yaakobi, an Israeli native who is currently a graduate student at University of California at San Diego, is one of five students selected worldwide to receive the prestigious Marconi Young Scholar Award. Yaakobi, a Summa Cum Laude graduate of the Technion in Haifa, is being honored for his work in error-correcting coding in flash memories, among other things.
The ceremony will take place on October 9 in Bologna, Italy, following the two-day Marconi Symposium. The date marks the centennial of Guglielmo Marconi's receipt of the Nobel Prize for his work in the development of wireless telegraphy. Both events are being co-hosted by the Guglielmo Marconi Foundation of Bologna.
Marconi is considered the "father of radio."
Now in its second year, the Marconi Young Scholar Awards Program recognizes outstanding young researchers in the fields of internet and communications. Yaakobi was selected by the prize committee for his outstanding work in communications and information theory, with a particular emphasis on error-correcting coding in flash memories, contributing to a reduction in cost and an increase in capacity.
A native of Israel's northern town of Kiryat Shmonah, Eitan received two B.A. degrees in 2005, both Summa Cum Laude, in
Computer Science and Mathematics, from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. He completed his M.Sc., Summa Cum Laude in Computer Science there as well. While at UCSD, he received the UCSD Jacobs School Fellowship, awarded to a promising graduate student at the school.
"Marconi Society Young Scholars have demonstrated extraordinary early promise and already have made an impact in their fields of research," said Robert Lucky, chairman of the Marconi Society. "The selection committee looks for candidates who show the potential to win the Marconi Prize - the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in communications science - at some point in the future. As a point of reference, Marconi Fellows have been at the forefront of every modern advance in telecommunications and the Internet."
The Marconi Society Young Scholars Awards were launched with a generous donation from 2007 Marconi Fellow Ronald L. Rivest, an MIT professor who was a co-founder of RSA encryption, the major encryption system used throughout
the world for secure transactions on the internet.