CITC 2024

Welcome Welcome to the 2024 Cambridge Information Theory Colloquium!

Following the inaugural event in 2023, we organised this one-day event on Friday, 10 May 2024, centred around top-quality talks in information theory and related areas. In addition, there was a poster session for doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers. The main aim was to bring together UK researchers in information theory and related areas as well as friends of the UK information theory community.

Location The Colloquium will take place at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1PZ, UK. Room: LR4, Baker building (next to reception).

Confirmed Speakers

• Thomas Courtade University of California, Berkeley
• Oliver Johnson University of Bristol
• Yossef Steinberg Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology

Schedule

Talks

• Title: A galaxy of information inequalities, with applications
• Speaker: Thomas Courtade University of California, Berkeley
• Abstract: This talk will cover recent developments in information inequalities, with an emphasis on unifying perspectives. In particular, I'll present a general class of entropy inequalities, and demonstrate a variety of applications to information theory, analysis, geometry, statistics (and more!). This talk is based in part on joint works with Jingbo Liu and Efe Aras.
• Thomas Courtade is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and a core member of the Center for Computational Biology at UC Berkeley. He received his PhD from UCLA in 2012 and was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University within the NSF Center for Science of Information.

  ---

• Title: Relative entropy bounds for sampling with and without replacement
• Speaker: Oliver Johnson University of Bristol
• Abstract: It is well-known that the distributions resulting from sampling with and without replacement from an urn of balls of c colours are close in a variety of senses. However, previous bounds on the relative entropy have not depended on the counts of balls of each colour. We remedy that here, providing two bounds which are tight for "balanced" (roughly equal numbers of each colour) and "unbalanced" cases respectively. As a consequence, we are able to deduce bounds of optimal order in the finite de Finetti theorem, which describes the probability distributions of exchangeable sequences.

  (based on joint work https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06632 with Lampros Gavalakis, Ioannis Kontoyiannis)

• Oliver Johnson is a Professor of Information Theory and Director of the Institute for Statistical Science in the School of Mathematics at the University of Bristol. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2000 and was a Clayton Research Fellow with Christ’s College, Cambridge, and a Max Newman Research Fellow with Cambridge University until 2006.

  ---

• Title: Robust Cooperation Schemes
• Speaker : Yossef Steinberg Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology
  
• Abstract: It has long been observed that cooperation in communication networks can significantly enhance the network performance. Cooperation can take place in many forms: conference links between users, helpers that send to the users information on the channel state, feedback links that enable message sharing between users, and more. Each of these forms require system resources - dedicated time slots, bandwidth, energy, computational power etc. Unfortunately, in modern communication networks, these resources cannot be guaranteed a-priori: users that serve as helpers come and go, their willingness to serve others' communication needs may depend on battery status, mobility, and other parameters that cannot be predicted before communication begins. Moreover, often active users cannot be notified about missing system resources, thus coding schemes cannot be dynamically updated according to system state. Hence there is a need for robust coding schemes, that utilize cooperation resources when they exist, but can operate also when they are absent, possibly at reduced decoding rates. Naturally, robustness does cost something — the resulting rates would be lower than the achievable rates when the system state (resources) is stable and known a priori to all. In this talk I will present basic cooperation/helpers models. I will discuss situations where users cannot be notified about the availability of conference links or helpers, thus requiring robust schemes. Bounds and capacity results will be presented for a few central models. This talk is based in part on joint works with Dor Itzhak and Wasim Huleihel.

• Yossef Steinberg is a Professor at the Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology. He received his PhD from Tel-Aviv University in 1990. He was a Lady Davis Fellow with the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology and a Postdoctoral Researcher at Princeton University.

  ---

Registration

Registration is free but required to make the appropriate logistics arrangements. Registration is now closed.

Registration deadline: Thursday, 2nd May Monday, 6th May

Organisers

Amir R. Asadi University of Cambridge

Albert Guillén i Fàbregas University of Cambridge

Participants

Thomas Courtade University of California, Berkeley

Oliver Johnson University of Bristol

Yossef Steinberg Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology

Gholamali Aminian The Alan Turing Institute

Varun Jog University of Cambridge

Osvaldo Simeone KCL

Po-Ling Loh University of Cambridge

Eugenio Clerico Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona

Sidharth Jaggi University of Bristol

Samir Perlaza INRIA

Samah A. M. Ghanem

Amir R. Asadi University of Cambridge

Albert Guillén i Fàbregas University of Cambridge

Pouya Moeini University of Cambridge

Xiaoqi Shirley Liu University of Cambridge

Francesc Molina Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain

Ioannis Kontoyiannis University of Cambridge

Valentinian Lungu University of Cambridge

Huiying Song Tokyo Institute of Technology

Sharu Theresa Jose University of Birmingham

Lan V. Truong University of Essex

Lampros Gavalakis Univ Gustave Eiffel

Ramji Venkataramanan University of Cambridge

Cong Ling Imperial College London

Hao Yan Imperial College London

Pablo Pascual Cobo University of Cambridge

Iñaki Esnaola University of Sheffield

Petros Georgiou University of Birmingham

Mostafa Rahmani Ghourtani University of York

Yirong Shen Imperial College London

Hui-An Shen University of Bern

Matthew Aldridge University of Leeds

Andreas Theocharous University of Cambridge

Sergio Bacallado University of Cambridge

Jossy Sayir University of Cambridge

Alister Burr University of York

• Log In