About The Distinguished Lecturer Program

Distinguished Lecturers

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.

Pictures of current and past Distinguished Lecturers can be found here.

Current Distinguished Lecturers

The following is a list of the current Distinguished Lecturers.

2018-2020 Lecturers	Presentation(s)
Marco Dalai (2018-2019)
Amos Lapidoth (2018-2019)
Vincent Tan (2018-2019)	Recent Advances in Ranking: Adversarial Respondents an Lower Bounds on the Bayes Risk; University of Toronto; June 11, 2018 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
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)
Natasha Devroye (2019-2020)
Syed Jafar (2019-2020)
Roy Yates (2019-2020)
Aylin Yener (2019-2020)

Past Distinguished Lectures

The following is a partial list of past Distinguished Lectures with slides.

Lecturer	Presentation(s)
Tara Javidi (2017-2018)	(forthcoming)
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)	(forthcoming)
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)	(forthcoming)
Ron M. Roth (2016-2017)	(forthcoming)
Olgica Milenkovic (2016-2017)	(forthcoming)
Babak Hassibi (2016-2017)	(forthcoming)
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)	(forthcoming)
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)	(forthcoming)
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)	(forthcoming)
Tracey Ho (2014-2015)	(forthcoming)
Giuseppe Caire (2014-2015)	(forthcoming)
Erdal Arikan (2014-2015)	(forthcoming)
Rüdiger Urbanke (2013-2014)	(forthcoming)
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)	(forthcoming)
Elza Erkip (2013-2014)	(forthcoming)
Helmut Bölcskei (2013-2014)	(forthcoming)
Emre Telatar (2012-2013)	(forthcoming)
Shlomo Shamai (Shitz) (2012-2013)	(forthcoming)
Frank R. Kschischang (2012-2013)	(forthcoming)
Young-Han Kim (2012-2013)	(forthcoming)
Christina Fragouli (2012-2013)	(forthcoming)
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)	(forthcoming)
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)	(forthcoming)
Michael Gastpar (2010-2011)	(forthcoming)
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)	(forthcoming)
Amin Shokrollahi (2010-2011)	(forthcoming)
Sergio Verdú (2010-2011)	(forthcoming)

Past Distinguished Lectures

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