2016 Bell Labs Prize winners

This year’s Bell Labs Prize was awarded to Sungwon Chung, Hossein Hashemi, and Hooman Abediasl from the University of Southern California for their work on “Large-Scale Plasmonic Optical Phased Array - an architectural innovation for nanodevices”. The third annual prize winner was announced on Wednesday, 14 December, in Murray Hill, NJ, at the worldwide headquarters of Nokia Bell Labs, after an intense final round of presentations given by outstanding researchers across a wide range of disciplines.  The 2016 winners excelled by demonstrating breakthroughs in wireless, optics, and mathematics.

Chung, Hashemi and Abediasl were joined on the podium by two other leading researcher teams. The second prize of $50,000 was awarded to Elad Hazan for his work on “Linear Learning for Deep Insight” and the third prize of $25,000 was awarded to Apostolos Georgiadis, Emmanouil Tentzeris, George Goussetis for their work on “3D/Inkjet Printed Millimeter Wave Systems”.

This year’s winners were selected from among seven finalists, who were in turn drawn from a total field of over 250 proposals from 41 countries. All of the prize winners demonstrated game-changing ideas in science, technology, engineering or mathematics with the potential to improve the future of the human experience by ten-fold. In addition to their cash prizes, the winners will also be given the opportunity to collaborate with the world-renowned researchers at Nokia Bell Labs on the further development of their ideas.

Pictured below are the teams (1st, 2nd, and 3rd place from left to right) receiving their awards from Marcus Weldon.  

In presenting the awards to this year’s winners of the Bell Labs Prize, Marcus Weldon, President of Nokia Bell Labs and Nokia’s Chief Technology Officer, said, “We are delighted to recognize this year’s Prize winners and their brilliant ideas. The winners embody the essence of Bell Labs and the Bell Labs Prize – solving the great challenges facing humankind in the coming 10 years, with disruptive solutions that ‘think differently’.  We received an impressive variety of innovative proposals – from machine learning and computing technologies, to breakthroughs in optics, to new kinds of integrated circuits and component technologies and novel wireless networking techniques and approaches. We look forward to collaborating with these leading innovators to help turn these ideas into reality.”

The seven finalists presented their ideas to a distinguished jury of judges both from within and outside of Bell Labs. Congratulations to the 2016 winners!

Written by Lisa Ciangiulli