Distinguished Lecturer Program

The Information Theory Society established the Distinguished Lecturers Program to promote interest in information theory by supporting chapters who wish to invite prominent information theory researchers to give talks at their events. The Society aims to maintain ten Distinguished Lecturers each serving for two year terms. Typically, the ITSoc Distinguished Lecturers program provides funding for airfare and travel, and the local chapter funds accommodation and local expenses. If traveling to a different continent, visits to two locations are required. The distinguished lectures should be freely accessible to the public.

Criteria and Eligibility

The selection criteria are: (a) the quality of the candidates’ contributions to research in information theory and related areas, and (b) the ability of the candidates to deliver an excellent lecture to a broad audience. The candidates may be from any geographic region and any organization, e.g., academia, industry, or government. Nominations that promote diversity are encouraged. The Distinguished Lecturers are typically members of the IEEE Information Theory Society.

See the list of current Distinguished Lecturers.

All nominations for Distinguished Lecturers should be submitted using the online form.

Current (bold) and Past Distinguished Lectures

Lecturers Presentations
Aditya Ramamoorthy (2024-2025)  
Anand Sarwate (2024-2025)  
Anelia Somekh-Baruch (2024-2025)  
Si-Hyeon Lee (2024-2025)  
Vinod Prabhakaran (2024-2025)  
Ashish Khisti (2023-2024)  
Oliver Kosut (2023-2024)  
Arya Mazumdar (2023-2024)  
Chao Tian (2023-2024)  
Shun Watanabe (2023-2024)  
Pulkit Grover (2022-2023)  
Hamed Hassani (2022-2023)  
Parastoo Sadeghi (2022-2023)

Viewing Differential Privacy through the Lens of Information Theory
Linköping University Information Coding Division (ICG), October 24, 2023

Privacy through the Lens of Information Theory
KTH and Digital Futures Centre, October 9, 2023

Michèle Wigger (2022-2023)

Channel Capacity and Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC)
University of Bergen, October 19, 2023

Ning Cai (2021-2022)  
Lara Dolecek (2021-2022)  
Deniz Gunduz (2020-2022)  
Lalitha Sankar (2020-2022)  
Yossef Steinberg (2020-2022)  
Changho Suh (2020-2022)  
Daniela Tuninetti (2020-2022)

Low-latency high-reliability communications
IEEE AP-S Northeast Brazil WEEK, December 7, 2021

Demand-Private and Content-Secure Caching Networks
UIC Distinguished Lecturer Series, September 18, 2020

Natasha Devroye (2019-2021)

Interactive Communications
University of Texas, Austin, April 10, 2019
Texas A&M University, April 11, 2019
University of Texas, Dallas, April 12, 2019

Syed Jafar (2019-2021)

 
Roy Yates (2019-2021)  
Aylin Yener (2019-2021)  
Marco Dalai (2018-2019)  
Amos Lapidoth (2018-2019)

All data are equal, but some data are more equal than others
North Macedonia, March 2019

Vincent Tan (2018-2019)

Minimum Rates of Approximate Sufficient Statistics                                                  
University of Waterloo, June 13, 2018

Recent Advances in Ranking: Adversarial Respondents and Lower Bounds on the Bayes Risk
McMaster University, June 15, 2018
University of Toronto, June 11, 2018

On the Maximum Size of Block Codes Subject to a Distance Criterion                    
Taiwan, January 26, 2019

Sennur Ulukus (2018-2019)

Private Information Retrieval: How to Get Something Without Revealing What You Got
University of Waterloo, on April 2, 2018
McMaster University, on April 3, 2018
University of Toronto, on April 4, 2018

Aaron Wagner (2018-2019)

How to Measure Side-Channel Leakage                                                                        
Texas A&M, October 17-19, 2019

Tara Javidi (2017-2018)  
Navin Kashyap (2017-2018)

The Communication Complexity of Secret Key Generation
Bertinoro, Italy, May 11, 2018

Feedback Capacity and Coding for Binary-Input Memoryless Channels with a No-Consecutive-Ones Input Constraint
Telecom Paris Tech, France, May 15, 2018

Probabilistic Forwarding Over Networks: To Code Or Not To Code?
Technical University of Munich, Germany, May 18, 2018

Chandra Nair (2017-2018)  
Osvaldo Simeone (2017-2018)

Fog-Aided Wireless Networks: An Information-Theoretic View
Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden, Aug 31, 2017
Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden, Sep 6, 2017
Lund University, Lund, Sweden, Sep 7, 2017
KTH, Stockholm, Sweden, Sep 8, 2017
NYU Poly, Brooklyn, USA, Nov 2, 2017
GdR meeting, Paris, France, Dec 8, 2017
Technion, Haifa, Israel, Dec 21, 2017
Seventh Van der Meulen seminar, University of Twente, The Netherlands, April 12, 2018

Ram Zamir (2017-2018)  
Martin J. Wainwright (2016-2017)  
Ron M. Roth (2016-2017)  
Olgica Milenkovic (2016-2017)  
Babak Hassibi (2016-2017)  
Suhas Diggavi (2016-2017)

Foundations of secure cyber physical systems
McMaster University, Toronto, Canada, Monday, 19 October, 2015
National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, May 15, 2017

Interactive wireless network security
Academica Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, May 16th, 2017
National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), May 17th, 2017

Emina Soljanin  (2015-2016)

Cloud Storage Space vs. Download Time for Large Files  
Arizona State University, US, September 11, 2015 
University of Illinois at Chicago, US, November 6, 2015 
Aalto University, Finland, August 31, 2016

Network Multicast: A theoretical Minimum and an Open Problem  
Aalto University, Finland, August 31, 2016

Henry Pfister  (2015-2016)

Graphical Models and Inference: Insights from Spatial Coupling 
Lund University, Sweden, September 16, 2016

Andrea Montanari  (2015-2016)  
Gerhard Kramer  (2015-2016)

Communication Rates for Phase Noise Channels  
Spanish IT Chapter Doctoral School San Sebastian, Spain, July 3, 2015

Bounds on the Capacity of Optical Fiber Channels  
Linköping University, Sweden, June 2, 2016 

Information Rates for Phase Noise Channels (including fiber optic channels)  
Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, September 15, 2016

Models and Capacity Bounds for Optical Fiber Channels  
Imperial College, University of York, University of Cambridge, UK, December 14-16, 2016 

Alexandros Dimakis (2015-2016)  
Frans M.J. Willems (2014-2015)

Combining the Burrows Wheeler Transform and the Context-Tree Weighting Algorithm
1st Seminar on Future Directions in Information Theory and Communications &
2nd African Winter School on Information Theory and Communications
Protea Hotel Kruger Gate, South Africa, August 18, 2015

Waiting-Times Dependence Balances Search Codes , and  False Acceptance  (4 parts) 
IEEE EURASIP Spain Seminar on Signal Processing, Communication and Information Theory,
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, December 11, 2014.

Pascal Vontobel (2014-2015)  
Tracey Ho (2014-2015)

 

Giuseppe Caire (2014-2015)

 

Erdal Arikan (2014-2015)

 

Rüdiger Urbanke (2013-2014)  
H. Vincent Poor (2013-2014)

Feedback in Wireless Networks: Recent Results and Discoveries
The Technion, Haifa, Israel, June 13, 2013

Feedback in Wireless Networks: Recent Results and Discoveries
Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany, September 2, 2013

Games, Privacy and Distributed Inference for the Smart Grid
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China, September 17, 2013

Smart Grid: The Role of the Information Sciences
Northeastern University, Boston, MA, September 18, 2014

Muriel Médard (2013-2014)  
Elza Erkip (2013-2014)  
Helmut Bölcskei (2013-2014)

 

Emre Telatar (2012-2013)

 

Shlomo Shamai (Shitz) (2012-2013)

 

Frank R. Kschischang (2012-2013)

 

Young-Han Kim (2012-2013)

 

Christina Fragouli (2012-2013)

 

Raymond Yeung  (2011-2012)

Refinement of Two Fundamental Tools in Information Theory  
Technical University of Munich (TUM), Munich, Germany, Jun 10, 2011
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Jun 24, 2011
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH), Jun 27, 2011

David Tse (2011-2012)

Information Theory of High-throughput Shotgun Sequencing
Tel Aviv University, Israel, June 4, 2012

The Science of Information; From Communication to DNA Sequencing
University of British Columbia, September 14, 2012

The Science of Information; From Communication to DNA Sequencing
Chinese University of Hong Kong, December 14, 2012 

Alex Grant (2011-2012)  
Max Costa   (2011-2012)

Dirty Paper Coding and Distributed Source Coding - Two views of combined source and channel coding
Interference Channels
Eindhoven University of Technology, Dec 4th, 2012 

Toby Berger (2011-2012)  
Michael Gastpar (2010-2011)  
Andrea Goldsmith (2010-2011)

The road ahead for wireless technology: Dreams and Challenges
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro Brazil, Oct. 13, 2011
Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Valparaiso Chile, Dec. 30, 2010

Alon Orlitsky (2010-2011)  
Amin Shokrollahi (2010-2011)  
Sergio Verdú (2010-2011)