Resources on Information Theory

There are many resources available to learn more about information theory, geared towards a variety of audiences.

• Researchers may be interested in journals or surveys
• Students may be interested in books, courses and lecture notes, or dissertations
• General audiences may find our video tutorials of interest

The 100th anniversary of the birth of Claude Shannon, the founder of Information Theory, was recently, and a number of events geared towards the public were held around the world.

Distinguished Lecturer Program

The IT Society Distinguished Lecturer Program is designed to promote interest in information theory by supporting chapters who wish to invite prominent information theory researchers to give talks at their events. 

Multimedia Resources

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Journals and Surveys

In addition to the IT Society's publications, including our flagship journal, the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, there are several other journals whose topics include information theory.

• Advances in Mathematics of Communications – topics include coding theory, cryptology, combinatorics, finite geometry, algebra and number theory and related topics.
• Communications in Information and Systems – Information and Coding theory, Cryptology, Decision and Estimation, Control Theory, Mathematical System Theory, Signal and Image Processing, Communication theory, Image Database, Data mining, Probabilistic Reasoning, Learning Theory, Speech Recognition, Computer Vision, Discrete Event System, Partial Differential Equations, Complex Fluids
• Entropy – entropy and information studies
• Problems of Information Transmission – the English translation of Problemy Peredachi Informatsii, covering statistical information theory; coding theory and techniques; noisy channels; error detection and correction; signal detection, extraction, and analysis

Survey articles on information theory are a great way to learn about more specialized topics at an introductory level.

• Shannon's 1948 paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," started the field of Information Theory.
• The October 1998 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (Vol. 44, Issue 6), guest edited by Sergio Verdú, contained a collection of surveys celebrating the 50th anniversary of Shannon's landmark paper.
• Foundations and Trends® in Communications and Information Theory has many monographs on recent and emerging topics in information theory.

Courses and Lecture Notes

There are a number of publicly available courses and lecture notes on information theory. These links are provided as a resource but are not officially endorsed by ITSOC.

• Abbas El Gamal and Young-Han Kim, "Lecture Notes on Network Information Theory", http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.3404, 2010.
• Information Theory, a MOOC taught by Professor Raymond W. Yeung of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
• A Brief Introduction to Machine Learning for Engineers, lecture notes by Osvaldo Simeone (King's College, University of London).