Padovani Lecturer: Elza Erkip
“It is a great honor to be named as the 2022 Padovani Lecturer. I am looking forward to meeting with students and postdocs and exchanging ideas at the Information Theory School.”
The IEEE Information Theory Society (ITSoc) is pleased to announce that Professor Elza Erkip of New York University is named the 2022 Padovani Lecturer. The Padovani Lecturer Program was established with a generous gift by Dr. Roberto Padovani in 2009. The award provides for an outstanding member of the information theory community to deliver a lecture at one of the ITSoc’s Schools of Information Theory, for the benefit of students and postdoctoral researchers.
Elza Erkip is an Institute Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at New York University Tandon School of Engineering. She received the B.S. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. Her research interests are in information theory, communication theory, and wireless communications. She is a Member of the NYU Wireless Research Center.
Dr. Erkip is a member of the Science Academy of Turkey, a Fellow of the IEEE, and a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher. She received the NSF CAREER award in 2001, the IEEE Communications Society WICE Outstanding Achievement Award in 2016, the IEEE Communications Society Communication Theory Technical Committee (CTTC) Technical Achievement Award in 2018, and the IEEE Communications Society Edwin Howard Armstrong Achievement Award in 2021. Her paper awards include the IEEE Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Paper Prize in 2004, the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communication in 2013 and the IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award in 2019. She was a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society 2012-2020, where she was the President in 2018. She was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society from 2013 to 2014.
Goldsmith Lecturer: Shirin Saeedi Bidokhti
"I am truly honored to be selected as a 2022 Goldsmith Lecturer. I would like to thank my nominators, Prof. Gerhard Kramer and Prof. Aylin Yener, as well as Prof. Goldsmith for establishing and promoting this opportunity for early career women researchers. I am excited to present my work and looking forward to the IT society’s school of Information Theory."
The IEEE Information Theory Society (ITSoc) is pleased to announce that Professor Shirin Saeedi Bidokhti has been named the 2022 Goldsmith Lecturer. The Goldsmith Lecturer Program was established with a generous gift by Dr. Andrea Goldsmith and is supported by several corporate sponsors (see https://www.itsoc.org/honors/goldsmith-lecture for full details). The award provides travel support for an outstanding early-career woman researcher to deliver a lecture at one of the ITSoc’s Schools of Information Theory, held for the benefit of students and post-doctoral researchers. By highlighting technical achievements of early career women, the ITSoc Goldsmith Lecturer Program helps the award recipients build their professional career and recognition. The Lectureship contributes to the public visibility of the researcher and helps increase the diversity of IEEE ITSoc and IEEE as a whole, as women are an under-represented group in both. The award recipient will also serve as a role model and inspiration to diverse students attending the Information Theory Schools.
Shirin Saeedi Bidokhti is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) with a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer and Information Systems. She received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer and Communication Sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and her B.Sc degree from University of Tehran. Prior to joining UPenn, she was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University and the Technical University of Munich. She has also held short-term visiting positions at ETH Zurich, University of California at Los Angeles, and the Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of information theory, networking, and learning. She is a recipient of the 2021 NSF-CAREER award, 2019 NSF-CRII Research Initiative award and the prospective researcher and advanced postdoctoral fellowships from the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Distinguished Lecturers: Pulkit Grover, Hamed Hassani, Parastoo Sadeghi & Michèle Wigger
"I am delighted to receive this honor. The kindness and generosity of our community has always enabled and motivated me. I am especially thankful to my nominators, Prof. Andrea Goldsmith and Prof. Todd Coleman, who continue to inspire and mentor me, and to my wonderful students and collaborators -- thank you for spending your time and effort with me. A heartfelt thanks to Prof. Rakesh K Bansal, who at IITK introduced me and many other information theorists to the joy of information theory. I have learnt so much from this community, and, through this lecturer-ship, I hope to connect with diverse researchers across the world, learn about their problems and approaches, and, when possible, join forces with them.”
The IEEE Information Theory Society (ITSoc) is also pleased to announce that Prof. Pulkit Grover from Carnegie Mellon Univeristy, Prof. Hamed Hassani from the University of Pennsylvania, Prof. Parastoo Sadeghi from the University of New South Wales, and Prof. Michèle Wigger from Telecom-ParisTech, have been named ITSoc Distinguished Lecturers for 2022–2023. The IEEE Information Theory Society established the Distinguished Lecturers Program to promote interest in information theory by supporting its local chapters to invite prominent information theory researchers to give lectures at their events.
Pulkit Grover (Ph.D. UC Berkeley'10, B.Tech, M.Tech IITK'05) is the Angel Jordan Associate Professor at CMU. His main contributions are towards advancing and experimentally validating science of information for engineering (and reverse engineering) computing systems, energy-efficient communication, distributed control, neural inference, and neural engineering. His lab is focused on advancing theory, algorithms, and hardware for fair and explainable machines on one hand, and for understanding, diagnosing, and treating disorders such as epilepsy, stroke, and traumatic brain injuries on the other. On these problems, his lab works extensively with data scientists, system and device engineers, neuroscientists, and clinicians. A goal of his neuroengineering work is ensuring that advances in engineering are accessible to all, regardless of their hair-type or skin color. Some of his work is impacting practice, e.g., in improving neural recordings at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. Pulkit received the 2010 best student paper award at IEEE Conference on Decision and Control; the 2011 Eli Jury Dissertation Award (UC Berkeley); the 2012 Leonard G. Abraham award (IEEE ComSoc); a 2014 NSF CAREER award; a 2015 Google Research Award; the 2018 inaugural award from the Chuck Noll Foundation for Brain Injury Research; the 2018 Spira Excellence in Teaching Award (CMU), and the 2019 best tutorial paper award (IEEE ComSoc). He has given two tutorials at ISIT (2018 and 2021), and a talk at NASIT'15. His students have won several awards and fellowships, founded an impactful healthcare startup, and have positions in academia, industry, and research labs. From 2019–2023, he’s leading the SharpFocus center, a multi-institution effort aimed at high-resolution noninvasive brain sensing and stimulation.
"This is a wonderful opportunity and great honor, and I am very much looking forward to presenting my work under the distinguished lecturers program to promote interests in information theory.”
Hamed Hassani is currently an assistant professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering department as well as the Computer and Information Systems department at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to that, he was a research fellow at Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing (UC Berkeley) affiliated with the program of Foundations of Machine Learning, and a post-doctoral researcher in the Institute of Machine Learning at ETH Zurich. He received a Ph.D. degree in Computer and Communication Sciences from EPFL, Lausanne. He is the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Information Theory Society Thomas M. Cover Dissertation Award, 2015 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory Student Paper Award, 2017 Simons-Berkeley Fellowship, 2018 NSF-CRII Research Initiative Award, 2020 Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Award, 2020 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, and 2020 Intel Rising Star award.
“I am incredibly honored and excited to be selected as a 2022 Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society. I look forward to sharing my research passion and results with our vibrant Information Theory community and I hope this Lectureship opens up many possibilities for better understanding and benefiting from each other’s work.”
Parastoo Sadeghi is a Full Professor with the School of Engineering and Information Technology, the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Canberra, Australia. She holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran and a PhD degree in electrical engineering and telecommunications from UNSW, Sydney, Australia. Prior to joining UNSW in 2020, she was a faculty at the Australian National University. Currently, she is intensively pursuing research in data sharing with strong privacy against inference attacks. However, she also makes regular contributions to network coding, index coding, communications and signal processing theory. Over her career, she has enjoyed extended visits to MIT, Technical University of Munich and University of California at San Diego and have collaborated with many leading researchers from around the world. She has co-authored a book, titled Hilbert Space Methods in Signal Processing and close to 200 refereed journal articles or conference papers. In 2019, she received a Future Fellowship Award from the Australian Research Council for her research on data privacy. From 2016 to 2019, she served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. From 2019 to 2020, she was a member on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society. She was the General Co-chair of IEEE ISIT 2021, which ran as a virtual event in July 2021. Between 2021 and 2022, Prof. Sadeghi is chairing the Schools Subcommittee of the IEEE Information Theory Society. In 2022, she will be serving as the Secretary of the IEEE Information Theory Society.
“It's my great honor and pleasure to be selected 2022 Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society. I'm looking forward to the interesting interactions and fruitful discussions that will come with this role.”
Michèle Wigger received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering, with distinction, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering both from ETH Zurich in 2003 and 2008, respectively. In 2009, she was first a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego, USA, and then joined Telecom Paris, France, where she is currently a full professor. Dr. Wigger has held visiting professor appointments at the Technion--Israel Institute of Technology and ETH Zurich. Dr. Wigger has served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Communication Letters and for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. During 2016-2019 she also served on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society. Dr. Wigger's research interests are in multi-terminal information theory, in particular in distributed source coding and hypothesis testing, in capacities of networks with cooperation, feedback, or cache memories, and in capacities of wireless optical channels.