Information Theory in the Age of AI - The Community’s Past, Present and Future Contributions
ITW 2027 will feature a panel with researchers who have helped shape the Information Theory Society. The discussion will begin with Shannon’s "blueprint" for reliable communication and the community’s decades-long pursuit of the fundamental limits it revealed, and then reflect on how the AI revolution is changing the field. The panelists will address the Information Theory Society’s role today and where the community can have its greatest impact in the age of AI.
Confirmed panelists include:
- Olgica Milenkovic - Franklin W. Woeltge Professor at the University of Illinois and co-founder of its Center for Artificial Intelligence and Modeling, connecting coding and information theory with DNA storage, graph and hypergraph learning, machine unlearning, and modern AI.
- Amin Shokrollahi - CTO and co-founder of Kandou AI, co-inventor of Tornado codes and inventor of Raptor codes, bringing coding-theoretic ideas from near-capacity communication to energy-efficient AI hardware and interconnects.
- Emina Soljanin - Distinguished Professor at Rutgers and former Bell Labs researcher, whose work has carried coding and information theory into distributed storage and computing, networked systems, and quantum information science.
- Rüdiger Urbanke - Professor at EPFL, 2023 Claude E. Shannon Award recipient and co-author of Modern Coding Theory, whose work spans capacity-approaching codes, graphical models, statistical physics, and the theoretical foundations of modern machine learning.
- Frans Willems - Professor Emeritus at Eindhoven University of Technology and 2026 Claude E. Shannon Award recipient, renowned for foundational contributions to multi-user information theory, source coding and compression, data embedding, and biometrics.
The panel will be moderated by Gerhard Kramer of TUM.