The IEEE has named the recipients of its 2027 Technical Field Awards, which recognise individual researchers and teams for technical achievements with societal impact. The winners were selected by the IEEE Awards Board and approved by the IEEE Board of Directors. In a statement, 2026 IEEE president and CEO Mary Ellen Randall described the honorees as embodying the innovation and ingenuity of the global engineering community.
Several of the awards touch on computing hardware and infrastructure. Edward Gage, Ganping Ju, and Jan-Ulrich Thiele of Seagate Technology received the Cledo Brunetti Award for heat-assisted magnetic technology that enables hard disk drives with very high capacity. Amin Vahdat of Google received the Koji Kobayashi Award for developing network systems that scale data centers for cloud computing and machine learning.
In the video space, Jens-Rainer Ohm, Gary J. Sullivan, and Benjamin Bross were recognised for their leadership in developing the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, which improves digital video compression efficiency. Other hardware-related honours include John Robert Brews for foundational work on MOS device physics and Akshay Kumar Rathore for power electronics converters.