David Tse writes about not only Claude Shannon's impact on communications, but also on how his work illustrates the importance of top-rate science. Read David's article in Quanta Magazine.

We look forward to receiving nominations from all members for the following Information Theory Society awards. Please note the deadlines to nominate.

Attention Students! IEEE now offers a discounted dues option for all student and graduate student members. Simply enter promotion code FUTURE50 when you join or renew to receive 50% off your student membership!

The intersection of information theory and computing has been a fertile ground for novel, relevant intellectual problems. Recently, coding-theoretic techniques have been designed to improve performance metrics in distributed computing systems. This has generated a significant amount of research that has produced novel fundamental limits, code designs, and practical implementations. The set of ideas leveraged by this new line of research is collectively referred to as coded computing. This special issue will focus on coded computing, including aspects such as tradeoffs between reliability, latency, privacy, and security. Specific topics of interest include:

The Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) will be recruiting a Bridge to the Faculty (B2F) Scholar with start date on August 16, 2021.

JSAIT Sixth Call for papers: Special Issue on Coded Computing. Papers due Feb. 15, 2021.

The 2020 IEEE European School of Information Theory (based in Stuttgart, Germany) is currently running as a virtual event. It is still accepting registrations and registration is free for members of the Information Theory Society.

The IEEE Information Theory Society (ITSoc) invites nominations for the position of Executive Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory for an 18-month term, starting on July 1, 2021. It is expected that the Executive Editor (EE) will subsequently transition to Editor-in-Chief (EiC) on January 1, 2023, for an additional 18-month term, ending on June 30, 2024.

Submit papers to the conference on Information-Theoretical Cryptography (ITC). Deadline Feb 1, 2021.

The submission deadline is (extended to) November 15, 2020.

Register now for the International Symposium on Information Theory and Its Applications (ISITA2020), held as a virtual symposium October 24–27. Plenary talks are held live by Zoom. Presentation videos are on-demand, and Gather is used for online chat and discussions.

The IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) is launching PROGRESS - an initiative aiming to motivate and support women and under-represented minorities to pursue academic careers in signal processing.

Joy Thomas, co-author of the seminal textbook "Elements of Information Theory" passed away on September 28, 2020 at the age of 57. Joy's career has included stints at IBM T J Watson Research Center and Google, and co-founding of two successful Silicon Valley companies.

The deadline for submission of papers for JSAIT's fifth issue (on Sequential, Active, and Reinforcement Learning) has been extended to Oct 15, 2020.

In response to a number of requests, the submission deadline for ITW 2020 has been extended to Oct. 20, 2020. Notifications are postponed to Dec. 20. Virtual participation to the conference will be guaranteed for safety reasons related to the COVID pandemic.

The open-access journal Entropy is arranging a special issue on “Information-Theoretic Aspects of Non-Orthogonal and Massive Access for Future Wireless Networks.” The submission deadline is April 1, 2021. For more information on the scope and publication process, please see https://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/special_issues/massive_access

The IEEE Information Theory Society now has a LinkedIn page. Follow our page to get the latest news and events from the IT Society in your LinkedIn feed.

The 2020 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW) will be held in Riva del Garda from 11–15, April 2021. Plenary speakers include Andrea Montanari, Andreas Krause, Emina Soljanin, Gabor Lugosi, Giuseppe Caire and Nina Balcan. Paper submission is currently open and the submission deadline is September 30. Virtual participation to the conference will be guaranteed for safety reasons related to the COVID pandemic.

The Center for Science of Information (CSoI) invites applications for its CSoI Postdoctoral Research Fellows program to work with Wojtek Szpankowski, CSoI Director. CSoI seeks a postdoctoral researcher to work on broad intersections of information theory, machine learning, combinatorics, and design and analysis of algorithms.