Joachim Hagenauer (born 29 July 1941) is an information theorist and professor emeritus at Technical University of Munich. He pioneered the use of soft bits (see Soft output Viterbi algorithm), a coding theory technique that contributes to the high performance of the turbo codes. Professor Hagenauer's work enabled the advancement of turbo coding and led to a significant improvement in channel coding for digital communications and storage. His works have been applied to digital receiver designs, satellite transmissions and other facets of telecommunications.