June 24, 2014
Professor En-hui Yang asked information theorists from around the continent to doubt everything—except, of course, their decision to study information theory (IT).
French philosopher René Descartes urged that “it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” Though it may seem contradictory, Professor Yang proposed we use this “method of doubt” to advance information theory research, using source coding as an example. “Information theory is very beautiful, and we also know that IT has a profound impact on practice,” he said.
Professor Yang addressed a crowd at this year’s IEEE North American School for Information Theory (NASIT’14), hosted at the University of Toronto. The event was coordinated in part by Professors Stark Draper and Ashish Khisti of The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, along with Professors Warren Gross of McGill University, Patrick Mitran of University of Waterloo and Serdar Yuksel of Queen’s University. NASIT’14 hosted 100 students from across North America and from farther abroad. The School featured six tutorial-style lectures from world leaders in the field, including Professor Yang, Professor Robert Calderbank of Duke University, Professor Andrea Goldsmith of Stanford University, Professor Alon Orlitsky of UCSD, Professor Henry Pfister of Texas A&M and ECE’s own Professor Brendan Frey.
Professor Frey spoke about unravelling some of the mysteries of the human genome’s three-billion-letter code. In particular, he discussed how his group is taking a statistical approach to predicting alternative splicing patterns in different cells—the process by which the static DNA code is reassembled into protein-making instructions in the form of messenger RNA (mRNA). “It turns out there are a lot of deviations that cause diseases in the process of splicing,” said Professor Frey. “We think we have a regulatory model that will predict mRNA changes…so now we’re looking at many different diseases,” including neural muscular atrophy and autism spectrum disorder.
Researchers and graduate students convened in the Bahen Centre for Information Technology for the four-day conference. Students promoted their work in a “30-second madness” exercise before the poster session each day—each presenter had only 30 seconds to introduce themselves, the central concepts and highlights of their work, and encourage attendees to stop by their poster. A computer projecting sand draining through an hourglass (or a fuse burning to light a rocket) kept everyone on time.
On Friday afternoon the academic focus of the school was complemented with career-oriented events. Professor Robin Sacks, the Director of Research at UofT’s Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead), led a dynamic workshop that got students and faculty to think about and discuss what leadership is, to identify the leadership skills they already have, and to identify those they need to acquire to be successful in their careers. Following ILead was an academic/industrial panel titled “The Road Ahead” where six panellists discussed their own career paths and provided hard-earned wisdom to an attentive audience. Panellists included tutorial speakers Calderbank and Goldsmith, as well as Professor Laura Balzano of University of Michigan, Dr. Petros Boufounos of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), Dr. Behrouz Khoshnevis of Royal Bank of Canada, and Dr. Adam Tenenbaum of Telus; the last two panellists are both ECE alumni. [Watch video of “The Road Ahead” panel]
“Our intent was to provide the students a deep, informal, and fun learning experience that covered central topics of Information Theory (multimedia compression, wireless, and error-correction coding) and also demonstrated how information theoretic thinking has impact on other fields (genomics, large-dimensional statistics, and signal processing).” said Professor Draper. “Students took advantage of the many opportunities to interact with tutorial speakers and other faculty in the lectures and in poster sessions, to network with their peers, to think a bit about non-technical skills, and to enjoy the Toronto summer. The Thursday night picnic on the Toronto Islands was especially memorable.”
NASIT is an annual event sponsored by the IEEE Information Theory Society. This was the seventh school, and was the first to be held in Canada. The location of NASIT’15 will be announced in July.
More information:
Marit Mitchell
Senior Communications Officer
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
416-978-7997; marit.mitchell@utoronto.ca