R�diger Urbanke is a professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the Ecole Polytechnique F�d�rale de Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL). He was awarded his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1995 from Washington University, after which he worked for Bell Labs until joining the faculty at EPFL in 1999. He is currently on the board for the 'Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory' series for the IEEE.