In This Issue:

Gallager and Metcalfe win Marconi Award

Information theorist Robert Gallager, left, and Ethernet developer Robert Metcalfe, right, winners of the 2003 Marconi International Fellowship awarded by The Guglielmo Marconi International Fellowship Foundation, flank Dean Zvi Galil at the awards ceremony. These two leaders of information technology share the Fellowship, the most prestigious award in telecommunications technology, for their “creative service to humanity.”

Gallager, professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a disciple and former collaborator of Claude Shannon, whose ideas laid the foundation of modern information theory. Gallager won acclaim in 1960 for developing a series of advanced communications codes that achieved in practice the theoretical limits that Shannon had postulated. His book, Information Theory and Reliable Communications, is regarded as the most authoritative on the subject.

Metcalfe, an entrepreneur and inventor, developed the Ethernet as a standard for interconnecting computers for high-speed data transfer while he was working as an engineer-scientist at Xerox. He went on to become a founder of 3Com Corp. and, since 2001, has been a general partner in Polaris Venture Partners, a Boston-area capital investment firm.