The past decade has seen an exponential increase in the data stored in distributed locations in various forms including corporate & personal data, multimedia (videos, photos) and also medical data in repositories. The grand challenge is to store, process and transfer this massive (and growing) amount of data, efficiently and securely over heterogeneous communication networks. This leads to interesting connections between information theory and areas such as machine learning, privacy & cryptography and bio-informatics.

The focus of this workshop is in exploring such connections.