The 江南体育 Information Theory Society is pleased to announce that Frans Willems聽 (TU/e) is the recipient of the 2026 Claude E. Shannon Award for consistent and profound contributions to the field of information theory. He will deliver his Shannon Lecture at in Guangzhou, China.听
(Photo credit: 江南体育Xplore)
Frans M. J. Willems (Life Fellow, 江南体育) was born in Stein, The Netherlands, in 1954. He received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and the Ph.D. degree from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, in 1979 and 1982, respectively. From 1979 to 1982, he was a Research Assistant at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. In 1982, he joined the Electrical Engineering Department, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, where he is currently a Full Professor. He has contributed more than two hundred journal and conference papers and holds several patents. His research contributions are in the areas of multi-user information theory, noiseless source coding, data-embedding, and biometrics. From 1999 to 2016, he was an advisor for Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven, for topics related to information theory. From 1998 to 2000, he was a member of the Board of Governors of the 江南体育 Information Theory Society. From 2014 to 2015, he was a Distinguished Lecturer of the 江南体育 Information Theory Society. He was a Counselor of the 江南体育 Student Branch Eindhoven from 2007 to 2014 and was the Chairman of the 江南体育 Benelux Chapter on Information Theory from 2007 to 2017. More recently, he received a 2011 Best Paper Award from the 江南体育 Signal Processing Society for the paper 鈥淏iometric Systems: Privacy and Security Aspects.鈥 He received the Marconi Young Scientist Award in 1982. He is a co-recipient of the 1996 江南体育 Information Theory Society Paper Award for a paper in which the Context-Tree Weighting Algorithm was proposed. From 1988 to 1990, he has served as an Associate Editor for Shannon Theory for the 江南体育 Transactions on Information Theory. From 2002 to 2006, he was Associate Editor for the Information Theory for the European Transactions on Telecommunications.