Main > IK355
Ioannis Kontoyiannis 
Background -
Publications
Position: Affiliated Staff; currently Churchill Professor of Mathematics, Department of Pure Maths and Mathematical Statistics
E-mail: ik355 [at] cam.ac.uk
Research interests
Information theory, data compression, applied probability, Bayesian statistics, simulation, machine learning applications, communications, mathematical and computational biology.
Professor Kontoyiannis primarily works on problems in information theory, applied probability and statistics. In information theory he is interested in understanding the fundamental (best achievable) performance limits of modern communications systems, given today’s practical technological constraints. His relevant work includes applications ranging from neuroscience to finance, and from signal processing to bioinformatics. In probability his main focus is the analysis of asymptotic, non-asymptotic, and spectral properties of general Markov chains. His primary interest here is in answering basic questions arising from important problems in applied areas including wireless networks, simulation, and learning algorithms. In statistics, his main area of interest is in the development of Bayesian methodological tools for model selection, inference, and machine learning tasks.
Background
Ioannis Kontoyiannis was born in Athens, Greece, in 1972. He received the B.Sc. degree in mathematics in 1992 from Imperial College (University of London), and in 1993 he obtained a distinction in Part III of the Cambridge University (Pure) Mathematics Tripos. In 1997 he received the M.S. degree in statistics, and in 1998 the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering, both from Stanford University. Between June and December 1995 he worked at IBM Research, on a NASA-IBM satellite image processing and compression project. From 1998 to 2001 he was an Assistant Professor with the Department of Statistics at Purdue University (and also, by courtesy, with the Department of Mathematics, and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering). Between 2000 and 2005 he has was an Assistant, then Associate Professor (tenured), with the Division of Applied Mathematics and with the Department of Computer Science at Brown University. Since 2005 he has been a Professor with the Department of Informatics of the Athens University of Economics and Business. He joined the Information Engineering Division of the Engineering Department at Cambridge in 2018, as Professor of Information and Communications.
He became Churchill Professor of Mathematics in the Department of Pure Maths and Mathematical Statistics in Cambridge in June 2020.
In 2002 he was awarded the Manning Endowed Assistant Professorship by Brown University; in 2004 he was awarded a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship; in 2005 he was awarded an Honorary Master of Arts Degree Ad Eundem by Brown University; in 2009 he was awarded a two-year Marie Curie Fellowship; and in 2011 he was elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow.
Publications
A selection of publications can be found
here.
