The Aaron D. Wyner Distinguished Service Award recognizes individuals who have shown outstanding leadership in, and provided long-standing exceptional service to, the information theory community. Alon Orlitsky is the recipient for 2022, in recognition of his numerous and impactful service contributions to the IEEE Information Theory Society. In particular, Orlitsky initiated the Information Theory and Applications Workshop (ITA) in 2006 and has been one of its main organizers since. ITA has flourished as a forum to foster and exchange ideas between the information theory community and related areas such as machine learning and theoretical computer science, having had an impact on both academia and industry. Orlitsky served as the President of the Society in 2016, was elected twice to the Board of Governors, has organized several workshops and symposia, and has contributed to a number of outreach projects including the "Bit Player" movie.

Orlitsky is the Qualcomm Professor for Information Theory and its Applications at the University of California, San Diego. He received a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from Ben Gurion University in 1981, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1986. He was a member of technical staff at Bell Labs from 1986 to 1996, and worked at D.E. Shaw from 1996 to 1997. He joined UCSD in 1997. He has received numerous awards for his technical work, including the Shannon Award in 2021.