Alain Glavieux

Biography

In the late 1980s, Professors Claude Berrou and Alain Glavieux, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (ENST) de Bretagne in Brest, France, developed a new family of error-correction codes, called turbo codes, and forever changed the field of digital communications. They then extended the turbo code principle to joint detection and decoding processing. Hailed as a milestone in communication technology, their discovery allowed researchers to overcome what had seemed to be the practical limits on the maximum rate at which coding systems could operate. Turbo codes have since been widely adopted in such applications as mobile telephony and satellite links.

Professor Glavieux has been a professor at ENST, since 1979. There, he was instrumental in developing a digital communication program and laboratory. He also created a research group focused on high performance communications systems and became head of the Signal and Communications Department. Professor Glavieux has written or cowritten, more than 30 papers and the book Communications Numeriques-Introduction. He holds four patents.

Professors Berrou and Glavieux have received the Stephen O. Rice Award for best paper in the IEEE Transactions on Communications, the IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award and an IEEE Information Theory Society Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation.