Prof. Frank Kschischang, the University of Toronto

Title

An Introduction to Lattices and their Applications in Communications

Biography

Frank R. Kschischang received the B.A.Sc. degree (with honors) from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, in 1985 and the M.A.Sc.  and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, in 1988 and 1991, respectively, all in electrical engineering.  He is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, where he has been a faculty member since 1991. During 1997-98, he was a visiting scientist at MIT, Cambridge, MA; in 2005 he was a visiting professor at the ETH, Zurich, and in 2011 and again in 2012-13 he was a visiting Hans Fischer Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Technical University of Munich.  

His research interests are focused primarily on the area of channel coding techniques, applied to wireline, wireless and optical communication systems and networks.  In 1999 he was a recipient of the Ontario Premier's Excellence Research Award and in 2001 (renewed in 2008) he was awarded the Tier I Canada Research Chair in Communication Algorithms at the University of Toronto.  In 2010 he was awarded the Killam Research Fellowship by the Canada Council for the Arts.  Jointly with Ralf Koetter he received the 2010 Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award.  He is a recipient of the 2012 Canadian Award in Telecommunications Research.  He is a Fellow of IEEE, of the Engineering Institute of Canada, and of the Royal Society of Canada.

During 1997-2000, he served as an Associate Editor for Coding Theory for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY, and since January 2014, he serves as this journal's Editor-in-Chief.   He also served as technical program co-chair for the 2004 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Chicago, and as general co-chair for ISIT 2008, Toronto.  He served as the 2010 President of the IEEE Information Theory Society.

Website 

http://www.comm.utoronto.ca/frank/  

Prof. Girish Nair, the University of Melbourne

Title

A Nonstochastic Theory of Information

Biography 

Girish  Nair was born in Malaysia and obtained a B. Engineering (Elec., 1st class Hons.) in 1994, B. Science (math.) in 1995, and Ph.D. (elec. eng.) in 2000, onscholarships from the Australian government and the University of Melbourne. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Melbourne, and has previously held visiting positions at the University of Padova, Boston University, and ETH Zurich. His research interests lie in  information theory and networked control, and his work has received  several prizes, including a SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize in 2006, and the Best Theory Paper Prize at the UKACC Int. Conf. Control, Cambridge Uni., 2000. He was an associate editor for the SIAM Jour. Control and Optimization from 2006 - 2011, and is an associate editor for the IEEE Trans.  Automatic Control from 2011.

Website

http://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/gnair/

Prof. Raymond Yeung, the Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title

Shannon's information measures and Markov structures

Biography

Raymond W. Yeung received the BS, MEng and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Cornell University in 1984, 1985, and 1988, respectively. He joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1988. He is currently Choh-Ming Li Professor of Information Engineering. A cofounder of network coding, he has been serving as Co-Director of the Institute of Network Coding since 2010. He is the author of the books A First Course in Information Theory (Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2002) and Information Theory and Network Coding (Springer 2008), which have been adopted by over 60 institutions around the world. His research interest is in information theory and network coding. He was a consultant in a project of Jet Propulsion Laboratory for salvaging the malfunctioning Galileo Spacecraft.

Professor Yeung is a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society from 1999 to 2001. He has served on the committees of a number of information theory symposiums and workshops. He was the General Chair of the First Workshop on Network, Coding, and Applications (NetCod 2005), a Technical Co-Chair of the 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, and a Technical Co-Chair of the 2006 IEEE Information Theory Workshop, Chengdu. He will organize with David Tse the 2015 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory in Hong Kong.

Professor Yeung also has s erved on the editorial board of a number of academic journals. He was an Associate Editor for Shannon Theory of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 2002 to 2005. He currently serves as an Editor-at-Large of Communications in Information and Systems, an Editor of Foundation and Trends in Communications and Information Theory and an Editor of Foundation and Trends in Networking. He was a recipient of the Croucher Senior Research Fellowship for 2000/01, the Best Paper Award (Communication Theory) of the 2004 International Conference on Communications, Circuits and System, the 2005 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award, and the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from  the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2007.

Professor Yeung is a Changjiang Chair Professor of Xidian University and an Advisory Professor of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers.

Website