Leibniz Prize Awarded to Giuseppe Caire

TU Berlin researcher revolutionized wireless communication

The 2021 Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Prize has been awarded to Professor Giuseppe Caire, PhD. The internationally renowned researcher is head of the Chair of Communications and Information Theory at TU Berlin. On 10 December 2020, the German Research Foundation (DFG) announced the recipients of Germany’s most important research award. Each individual award is endowed with a maximum of 2.5 million euros annually. 

Giuseppe Caire’s pioneering work on coded modulation has had a lasting impact on the standards of modern wireless communications. He is one of the world’s most frequently cited and leading experts on communications engineering and information theory. In 2014, Caire moved from the USA to Germany to take up an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship at TU Berlin. Shortly thereafter, in 2017, he acquired a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council.

Mobile communications, Bluetooth, and WLAN define everyday modern life. The research undertaken by Giuseppe Caire and his team focuses on this mobile, wireless communication and the development of technologies and standards to process the massively increasing data streams within wireless communication. The standards, protocols, and systems they have developed are now essential to digital communication.

Their research aims at making data-intensive content available to Internet users in a virtually completely scalable and cost-effective fashion. In other words, ultimately a paradigm shift from “gigabits per second for some - to terabytes per month for everyone". To achieve this objective, Caire and his team are exploiting new developments from network coding and caching. Caching refers to a resource-efficient option for the intermediate storage of data at strategic sites within the network.

President of TU Berlin congratulates

“We would like to congratulate Giuseppe Caire on this well-earned award and are pleased and proud to offer such an outstanding researcher a scientific home at TU Berlin and by extension at the science capital of Berlin. Giuseppe Caire uniquely combines innovative theoretical basic research and practical application and thus plays a key role in our University’s excellent reputation in the field of communication technology,” says Professor Christian Thomsen, president of TU Berlin. “His outstanding and impressive scientific career have made him a magnet for other extraordinary, talented individuals. Several of his international doctoral or post-doctoral students now hold their own professorships or leading research positions in large, international companies. This is a further testament to his scientific excellence.”

DFG announcement

In its announcement, the DFG acknowledged Caire’s many significant contributions, stating, “Giuseppe Caire has been awarded the Leibniz Prize for laying the foundation for key principles in information theory within the field of wireless modern communication and information technology. Among his many achievements, he developed the theoretical basis for the optimization of special modulation processes (Bi-Interleaved Coded Modulation, BICM), in which messages from a sender running over a noisy channel can be decoded at the receiver end nearly without error. Such processes are now standard in wireless communication. His most recent work on distributed caching systems, where information is saved in several places physically separate from one another, has led to entirely new findings in the field of information theory. Caire’s accomplishments also extend to technology transfer: Among other business ventures, he is co-founder of SpaceMUX, a Silicon Valley startup which developed technologies for wireless networks in companies.”            

About Giuseppe Caire

Guiseppe Caire was born in Italy in 1965. He received his doctorate from Politecnico di Torino in 1994 and went on to work as a researcher at the European Space Agency ESTEC in the Netherlands until he returned to Politecnico di Torino in 1995 as assistant professor. From 1997 to 1998 he was associate professor at the University of Parma before accepting a research grant at Princeton University in the United States. He was full professor at Sophia Antipolis in France between 1998 and 2005. Subsequently, he held a professorship at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA until 2014. Since April 2014, he has been an Alexander von Humboldt Professor at TU Berlin.

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