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Report on the 3Report on the 3rdrd & 4 & 4thth Annual Annual Schools of Information Schools of Information TheoryTheory Aylin Yener & Gerhard Kramer& Sriram Vishwanath

Presented at the BoG meetingSep 28, 2010, UIUCby Giuseppe Caire

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Report on the 3Report on the 3rdrd Annual Annual School of Information School of Information

TheoryTheoryheld at USC in Augustheld at USC in August

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Program Overview

Aug 5Thursday

Aug 6Friday

Aug 7Saturday

Aug 8Sunday

Opening remarks

2X60min Lectures Jack Wolf

2X60min Lectures Andrea Goldsmith

2X60min Lectures Emmanuel Candès

2X60min Lectures Alon Orlitsky

2X60min Lectures Sergio Verdú

Student Presentations1:30-3:30 pm

2X60min Lectures Rüdiger Urbanke

Student Presentations1-3 pm

Student Presentations

4-6 pm

Picnic! EE building 6:45 pm

Student Presentations

4-6 pm

Group Photo+ T-shirts! Dinner outside EE building 6:45 pm

Student Presentations

4-6 pm

Dinner outside EE building 6:45 pm

School Ends 3 pm

Lecture materials will be available online at: www.itsoc.org/school

Attendees 2010 IT School• Number of Applicants: 239 students• Confirmed: 178 (≈26% increase over 141 in

2009)

– Housing: 132 (≈135 in 2009)– No Housing: 46

• Cancellations: 61 (≈26% is quite high vs. 2009)

• Others: 6 instructors, 6 organizers,4 junior faculty, 7 guests

• Total: ≈ 200 people

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Estimated Budget

• USC housing: $27k– $50/person/night x 4 nights x 135

• Food: 4 days, 220 attendees ≈ $36k• Instructor/organizer travel = $8k• Materials = $5k• Incidentals = $1k• Travel Grants: $10k• Total: $87k

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Fundraising

• Housing fee: $120/student x 132 students ≈$15.8k

• ITSOC: $20k• ARL: $15k• NSF: $14k• USC Ming Hsieh Institute (1st grant!): $10k• Individual school contributions:

– USC EE: $2.8k– Northwestern, Rice, Texas A&M: $2k– Notre Dame, Penn State, UT Austin: $1k– Princeton: $0.5k

• Total: $87.1k

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Thank You

• Next: some important THANK YOU’s to our many volunteers

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Local volunteers

Thank YouThank You To Our USC Volunteers

• Food, Hotel, Housing, Registration and Packages:Anita Fung, Gerrielyn Ramos

• Students (from across the world!):Marjan Baghaie, Ozgun Bursalioglu, Prasanta Ghosh, Hassan Ghozlan, Joshua Gunn,Song-Nam Hong, Kung-Chuan Hsu,Hoon Huh, Dileep Kalathil, Jeong Gon Kim,Ching-Yi Lai, Chih-Ping Li, Angeliki Metallinou, Bill Ntranos, Krishnakumar Raman, Peyman Razaghi, Arash Saber Tehrani, Rahul Urgaonkar, Feng Wan, Bo Xiao, Daphney-Stavroula Zois

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Organizing Committee

Thank YouThank You To Our Organizers

• Matthieu Bloch:Web Site and Electronic Submissions

• Michelle Effros and Tracey Ho:Program and Applications

• Alex Dimakis and Mike Neely:T-Shirts, Local Organization

• Sriram Vishwanath: Treasurer

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Instructors

Thank YouThank You To Our Teachers

• Jack Wolf: Can an Information Theorist by Happy in a Center for Information Storage?

• Andrea Goldsmith: Seeking Shannon Capacity of Wireless Channels and Networks

• Emmanuel Candès: InformationTheory of Data Matrices: Recoveryfrom Incomplete and Corrupted Entries

• Alon Orlitsky: Probability Estimation over Large Alphabets

• Sergio Verdú: Reading Shannon• Rüdiger Urbanke: Approaching Shannon

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Financial Support

Thank YouThank You For Very Generous Contributions:

• IEEE Information Theory Society• ARL/ARO• NSF• USC Ming Hsieh Institute

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Financial Support (Continued)

Thank YouThank You To

• USC Electrical Engineering• Northwestern University - Master of Science

in Information Technology Program• Rice University - Center for Multimedia

Communication• Texas A&M University – ECE Department• Penn State - Networking and Security

Research Center• The University of Texas at Austin – Wireless

Networking and Communications Group• University of Notre Dame - Anonymous• Princeton University• Roberto Padovani

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Web Site & Newsletter• Web site: lectures & photos & videos

http://www.itsoc.org/school • A blog-like page with responses to

Sergio Verdú’s homework assignment “What surprises me most in reading Shannon's paper is....”will be public soon

• Detailed IT School report toappear in Dec. 2010 newsletter

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Future Schools • Enthusiasm about the School has spread!Enthusiasm about the School has spread!• Volunteers for future schools:Volunteers for future schools:

– 2011: UT Austin (Sriram Vishwanath & Tie Liu)

– 2012: Cornell (Aaron Wagner & Salman Avestimehr)

– 2013: Banff (Christian Schlegel))

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Report on the 2011 School Report on the 2011 School of Information Theoryof Information Theory

2011 School of Information Theory• Venue: Austin TX, UT campus• When: Memorial Day weekend (May 28-

31)• Why that weekend?

– Weather in Austin is still good– For quarter system:

• overlaps with just one working day(Tuesday, which will be a half day)

– For most semester systems, it isthe summer break

• Main issue with later dates: Austin’shot hot hot!

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Logistics

• Confirmed Organizing Committee members– Co-chairs: Tie Liu and Sriram

Vishwanath– Publicity: Matthieu Bloch– Posters: Bobak Nazer– Local Arrangements:

Sujay Sanghavi

• Further members (treasurer,t-shirts) being recruited

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