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Panelist Bios
Prakash Narayan
Biography: Prakash Narayan received the Bachelor of Technology degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1976, and the M.S. and D.Sc. degrees in Systems Science and Mathematics, and Electrical Engineering, respectively, from Washington University, St. Louis, MO., in 1978 and 1981.
He is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, with a joint appointment at the Institute for Systems Research. He is also a founding member of the Maryland Hybrid Networks Center (formerly the Center for Satellite and Hybrid Communication Networks), a NASA Commercial Space Center. He has held visiting appointments at ETH, Zurich; the Technion, Haifa; the Renyi Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest; the University of Bielefeld; the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (formerly LADSEB), Padova; and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
Dr. Narayan currently serves on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society. He has served as Associate Editor for Shannon Theory for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory; Co-Organizer of the IEEE Workshop on Multi-User Information Theory and Systems, VA (1983); Technical Program Chair of the IEEE/IMS Workshop on Information Theory and Statistics, VA (1994); General Co-Chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, Washington, D.C. (2001); and Technical Program Co-Chair of the IEEE Information Theory Workshop, Bangalore (2002).
Michael Langberg
Biography: Michael Langberg received his B.Sc. in mathematics and computer science from Tel-Aviv University in 1996, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in computer science from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1998 and 2003 respectively. Between 2003 and 2006, he was a postdoctoral scholar in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments at the California Institute of Technology, and between 2007 and 2012 he was in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at The Open University of Israel. Prof. Langberg is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University at Buffalo (State University of New York).
Prof. Langberg's research addresses the mathematical foundations of information, and in particular the design and analysis of efficient and reliable algorithms for the communication, management, and storage of information. Major topics of study include the fundamental algorithmic and combinatorial challenges that arise in the study of point-to-point communication, network communication, data storage, and succinct data representation. Prof. Langberg was an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory during the years 2012-2015, the Editor of the IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter during the years 2015-2018, and served on the IEEE Information Theory Society Board of Governors between the years 2022-2024. In 2022, Dr. Langberg was elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow for “contributions to the theory and practice of network coding.”
Remi Chou
Biography: Remi Chou is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science in the CSE department at UTA. From 2017 to 2023, he was an Assistant Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Wichita State University, Wichita, KS. From 2015 to 2017, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, in 2015, and the Engineering degree from Supélec, Gif-sur-Yvette, France in 2011.
His research is supported by an NSF-CAREER award, an NSF-CIF Collaborative Research award, and an NSF Convergence Accelerator award.
Yanina Shkel
Biography: Yanina Shkel is an Assistant Professor at École Polytechnique Féraletedérale de Lausanne.
She has been teaching and conducting research as a Scientist at EPFL between December 2019 and June 2023. Before this she was a research scholar at Princeton University and a postdoctoral fellow at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She completed my PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in August 2014. Before graduate school she worked as a developer for Morningstar Inc. where she administered databases containing and processing large amounts of financial data. During graduate school, she also spent time as an intern at 3M Corporate Research Labs where she applied her background in computation and information sciences for materials and product driven needs of 3M. Her lab at EPFL is supported by the Swiss NSF Starting Grant. Her postdoctoral research was supported in part by the NSF Center for Science of Information Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Jingbo Liu
Biography: Jingbo Liu is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics, University of Illinois, with affiliation to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is broadly interested in statistical inference, information theory, and high-dimensional statistics/probability. Many problems in these fields boil down to optimizing high-dimensional random functions or functions of multi-dimensional distributions. Information theory has deep connections to high-dimensional probability, and recent breakthroughs have been achieved by exploiting the rich interplay between the two. Functional inequalities, Markov semigroups, hypercontractivity, optimal transport, convex geometry, and auxiliary random variables have proven to be powerful tools for settling important open questions and unlocking new insights. Researchers have made significant progress in understanding the fundamental limits of communication, cryptography, statistics, and machine learning in high-dimensional settings. Recently, his group has focused on applying information theory and high-dimensional statistics to generative AI problems. This approach allows them to gain unique insights into the utility of diffusion models, methods for enhancing privacy and speed, and the surprising ease of generating new data compared to learning.
Nadim Ghaddar
Biography: Nadim Ghaddar is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia, hosted by Prof. Lele Wang. Prior to joining University of British Columbia, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto, hosted by Prof. Wei Yu. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California San Diego, where he was extremely fortunate to be advised by Prof. Young-Han Kim and Prof. Laurence B. Milstein. His research interests lie broadly in the intersections of information theory, wireless communication and signal processing.
Natasha Devroye
Biography: Natasha Devroye is a Richard and Loan Hill Professor in UIC’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, which she joined in January 2009. She is Belgian and Canadian, spends all sabbaticals in New Zealand, and lives in Chicago with her Swedish husband Prof. Jakob Eriksson. She loves to explore, learn new languages (spoken and technical), and drink nihonshu.
Oliver Kosut
Biography: Oliver Kosut received B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from MIT in 2004. He received a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2010, with advisor Professor Lang Tong. From August 2010 to August 2012 he was a post-doc at MIT. He joined Arizona State University in August 2012 , where he has been an Associate Professor since 2018. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2015. His research interests include information theory and other things that he pretends are information theory, including machine learning and power systems. He enjoys puzzles, and juggling.
Shun Watanabe
Biography: Shun Watanabe received B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degree from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2005, 2007, and 2009, respectively. During April 2009 to February 2015, he was an assistant professor of the Department of Information Science and Intelligence Systems at the University of Tokushima. During April 2013 to March 2015, he was a visiting assistant professor of the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland, College Park. During March to April 2016, he was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Henri Poincare. Since February 2015, he has been an associate professor of the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology. He is a senior member of IEEE and a member of IEICE. During 2016 to 2020, he served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. He served as a general co-chair of the 2021 IEEE Information Theory Workshop. During 2022-2024, he was a Board of Governor of IEEE Information Theory Society. He was an IEEE IT Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2024.
Matthieu R. Bloch
Biography: Matthieu R. Bloch is a Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received the Engineering degree from Supélec, Gif-sur-Yvette, France, the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in 2003, the Ph.D. degree in Engineering Science from the Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon, France, in 2006, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008. In 2008-2009, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN. Since July 2009, Dr. Bloch has been on the faculty of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and from 2009 to 2013 Dr. Bloch was based at Georgia Tech Lorraine. His research interests are in the areas of information theory, error-control coding, wireless communications, and cryptography. Dr. Bloch has served on the organizing committee of several international conferences; he was the chair of the Online Committee of the IEEE Information Theory Society from 2011 to 2014, an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 2016 to 2019 and again since 2021, and he has been on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society since 2016 and currently serves as the Senior Past President. He was an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security from 2019 to 2023. He is the co-recipient of the IEEE Communications Society and IEEE Information Theory Society 2011 Joint Paper Award and the co-author of the textbook Physical-Layer Security: From Information Theory to Security Engineering published by Cambridge University Press.
Daniela Tuninetti
Biography: Daniela Tuninetti (Fellow, IEEE) received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from ENST/Télécom ParisTech, Paris, France, in 2002, with work done at the Eurecom Institute, Sophia Antipolis, France.,She was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the School of Communication and Computer Science, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, from 2002 to 2004. She joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), in 2005. She is currently a Professor and the Head of the ECE Department, UIC. Her research interests include the ultimate performance limits of wireless interference networks (with special emphasis on cognition and user cooperation), low-latency high-reliability networks, content-type coding, cache-aided systems, and distributed private coded computing.,Dr. Tuninetti was a recipient of the Best Paper Award from the European Wireless Conference, in 2002, and the NSF CAREER Award, in 2007. She was a University of Illinois Scholar, in 2015. She was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter, from 2006 to 2008. She was an Editor of IEEE Communications Letters, from 2006 to 2009, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, from 2011 to 2014, and IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, from 2014 to 2017. She is an Editor of IEEE Transactions on Communications. She is also a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society.