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Professor Raymond Wai-Ho Yeung, Professor of Information Engineering of The Chinese University of Hong Kong was awarded the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award to visit Munich University of Technology from January to April, 2007.

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation grants approximately 20 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Awards annually to young, top-flight scientists and scholars from abroad who are already recognized as outstanding researchers in their fields. The research award has been endowed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in recognition of their research achievements to date. The award-winners are invited to work on research projects of their own choice in cooperation with colleagues in Germany.

A non-profit foundation, the Foundation is established by the Federal Republic of Germany for the promotion of international research cooperation. It promotes an active world-wide network of scholars and enables highly qualified scholars not resident in Germany to spend extended periods of research in Germany and promotes the ensuing academic contacts.

Professor Yeung received the BS, MEng and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Cornell University in 1984, 1985, and 1988, respectively. He was with AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1988-91. He joined the Department of Information Engineering of The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1991 and is currently a chair professor. He is the author of the book entitled A First Course in Information Theory (Springer 2002). His book has been adopted as text book or reference by leading US universities including Columbia University, Cornell University, MIT, and Stanford University.

Professor Yeung is a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 1999-2001. He has served on committees of a number of information theory symposiums, and is currently on the editorial board of a few international journals. He was a recipient of the Croucher Award for 2000/01, the Best Paper Award (Communication Theory) of the 2004 International Conference on Communications, Circuits and System, and the 2005 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers.

He is a co-founder of network coding theory, being among the most important breakthroughs in network communications. In 1997, Professor Yeung first applied the concept of coding to data transmission through a satellite network. Network coding has brought about a paradigm shift in network applications. Ever since its appearance, network coding has quickly developed into a research field that has fundamental influence on information theory, coding theory, networking, switching theory, wireless communications, computer science, cryptography, operations research, and matrix theory. It is now one of the hottest topics being worked on by researchers from leading universities and industrial laboratories worldwide, and international conferences on network coding have been held on a regular basis. His groundbreaking paper entitled “Linear Network Coding”, co-authored with Professor Shuo-Yen Robert Li and Dr. Ning Cai of Department of Information Engineering, CUHK, has been awarded the 2005 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award. It is the first time that Hong Kong-based scientists have been awarded the Award and also the first time in more than 30 years that it was won by Asian researchers. This paper proves the optimality of linear network coding, making possible the realization of network coding in practical applications.