Incentive for creative researchers in Germany
Düsseldorf/Stuttgart, June 5, 2008. At a special ceremony held in Stuttgart today, the Vodafone Research Foundation presented this year's Innovation and Development Prizes. The recipient of the 2008 Vodafone Innovation Prize, worth €25,000, is the Munich-based scientist Professor Ralf Kötter, whose groundbreaking research work in the field of information and coding theory has made a decisive impact on present-day mobile communications. The 2008 Vodafone Development Prize for Engineering and Natural Sciences goes to a physicist, Dr. Wojciech Welnic, whose research into a new category of materials has played a key role in the systematic development of high-performance storage media. The 2008 Development Prize for Market and Customer Orientation has been awarded to economist Sven Heidenreich, whose dissertation centered on an empirical study of the tariff dialing patterns of mobile communications users and yielded valuable information about the use of flat-rate offerings. Each of these two Development Prizes awarded by the Foundation to younger scientists is worth €5,000.
As Friedrich Joussen, CEO of Vodafone Germany, explains: "This year again, we consider it a great honor to be able to recognize the outstanding achievements of scientists in the German-speaking countries in this way. Not only our company, as a mobile communications provider, but also Germany as whole, benefits from the efforts of these creative research scientists. Their particular merit is not simply to have advanced technical developments or increased our understanding of economic interrelationships. They have also shown us the importance of venturing into the unknown and breaking new ground."
With the Innovation Prize and the Development Prizes, which have been awarded since 1997, the Vodafone Research Foundation honors outstanding results of research work. The prizes are awarded primarily to scientists in the German-speaking countries. The jury, comprising prestigious representatives of the worlds of science and industry, awards the prizes to individual persons or to groups.
Professor Kötter holds the Chair of Telecommunications Engineering at Munich's Technical University and is considered by experts to be one of the world's foremost scientists in the field of coding and information theory. For example, thanks to a straightforward technical solution his work on turbo equalization has helped elimi¬nate disturbances which occur in mobile radio transmissions, caused by multipath scattering, for instance, or the use of several antennas. His research work into network coding has also broken significant new ground. In the telecommunications industry his findings are regarded as an important basis for the development of even more efficient networks.
In his prizewinning dissertation, Dr. Wojciech Welnic examined the properties of so-called phase change materials (PCMs). This is a category of materials whose physical attributes can be altered by the effect of light and electric current. Although these phase change materials are already used in optical data storages, for exam¬ple rewritable CDs and DVDs, up to now little was known about the physical properties underlying their behavior. Through his theoretical and experimental research, Dr. Welnic has successfully closed major gaps in scientific knowledge in this field. It will now be possible to optimize these materials for a range of specific applications.
The economist Sven Heidenreich is the first person to study empirically why many mobile communications users prefer so-called flat rates to usage-dependent tariffs. He obtained his information and data by interviewing mobile radio consumers. Heidenreich attached particular importance to finding out the tariff preferences of his interviewees. He succeeded in showing why customers tend to opt for a flat rate with a fixed monthly charge. These findings will now help network carriers to adapt their tariff offerings to customers' requirements even more effectively.
Further information and photographs are available at: http://www.vodafone-stiftung-fuer-forschung.de