2020 IEEE European School of Information Theory (ESIT2020) - Virtual School

Stuttgart, Germany
[Photo: GillyBerlin (CC BY 2.0)]

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ESIT2020

The European School of Information Theory (ESIT) is an annual educational event, organized by the IEEE Information Theory Society (ITSoc), for graduate students, postdocs and researchers from institutes throughout Europe and beyond. The objective of the school is to provide participants with the opportunity (i) to learn from distinguished lecturers by attending long-format tutorials, (ii) to present their own work to obtain feedback and to start up collaborations, (iii) to hear about applications of information theory in industry, and (iv) to participate in a stimulating and inviting forum of scientists.

In 2020, the school was held online as a virtual school with the aim to preserve as much of the community experience as possible through moderated interactive Q&A sessions and virtual poster sessions.

Since ESIT2020 was the only ITSoc school in 2020 we were very happy to welcome many participants from all over the world!

School dates

November 23 to 27, 2020 (interactive Q&A and poster sessions), cf. schedule below.

Silhouette of some landmark buildings of Stuttgart. Left of the Stuttgart TV tower is Stuttgart Main Station, core of Europe's biggest infrastructure project: Stuttgart 21.

Tutorial Lectures

There were six tutorial lectures on current topics in or closely related to Information Theory. We were especially happy to have the 2020 IEEE ITSoc Goldsmith Lecturer, Professor Ayfer Özgür from Stanford University, among our confirmed speakers.

Each tutorial lecture was made available for downloading before the first day of the school. Viewers had the opportunity to submit questions to the lecturers and these questions were discussed in interactive moderated Q&A sessions on Zoom. Registered participants were also be able to join the sessions and ask their questions personally. Recordings of the sessions are available. The Zoom sessions were also available as live streams on Vimeo.

A complete list of the tutorial lectures together with their speakers is given below.

All videos (lectures and recordings of the Q&A sessions) are behind the "video showcase" link below and also (as embedded videos) in the schedule.

Short Lectures

Besides the six tutorial lectures, we had two short lectures that provided a different take on some of the topics covered by the tutorial lectures or gave introductions into additional topics.

Same as the tutorial lectures the short lectures were augmented by interactive moderated Q&A sessions.

The short lectures and their speakers are given below.

All videos (lectures and recordings of the Q&A sessions) are behind the "video showcase" link below and also (as embedded videos) in the schedule.

Video-Showcase on Vimeo

All lecture videos, all Q&A recordings as well as the 60 second madness teaser compilation are available directly on Vimeo, just follow the link behind the blue box. A password is required in to access the videos. This password was made available to the registered participants via eMail.

All videos are also available in the schedule below. The embedded Vimeo player is much more comfortable since it displays the chapter markers/time stamps of the videos.

Schedule (with embedded videos)

Tutorial lecture, short lecture and "one minute madness" videos were published and made accessible to registered participants

  • 14:30-15:15 Live-Q&A-Session with David Sutter on his tutorial lecture Quantum Information Theory. Session chair: Andreas Winter (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)
    • Lecture Video:
    • Recording of Q&A session:
  • 15:30-16:15 Live-Q&A-Session with Sennur Ulukus on her tutorial lecture Private Information Retrieval. Session chair: Rafael Schäfer (Technical University of Berlin, Germany)
    • Lecture Video:
    • Recording of Q&A session:
  • 14:30-15:15 Live-Q&A-Session with Jakob Hoydis et al. on their tutorial lecture Deep Learning Applications in Comunications. Session will be chaired by the speakers of the tutorial.
    • Lecture Video:
    • Recording of Q&A session:
  • 15:30-16:15 Live-Q&A-Session with Alexios Balatsoukas-Stimming on his tutorial lecture Efficient Decoding of Polar Codes: Algorithms and Implementations. Session chair: Stephan ten Brink (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
    • Lecture Video:
    • Recording of Q&A session:
  • 16:30-18:30 Virtual Poster Session
    • 60 second Madness Teaser Compilation:
  • 13:30-15:30 Virtual Poster Session
    • 60 second Madness Teaser Compilation:
  • 15:45-16:15 Live-Q&A-Session with Reinhard Heckel on his short lecture Theory of Deep Learning for Inverse Problems. Session chair: Paul Hand (Northeastern University, USA).
    • Short Lecture Video:
    • Recording of Q&A session:
  • 16:30-17:15 Live-Q&A-Session with Swanand Kadhe on his tutorial lecture Making Blockchains Scalable and Efficient: The Power of Codes. Session chair: Christian Senger (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
    • Lecture Video:
    • Recording of Q&A session:
  • 15:45-16:15 Live-Q&A-Session with Laurent Schmalen on his short lecture Spatially Coupled LDPC Codes - Theory and Applications. Session chair: Gianluigi Liva (German Aerospace Center/DLR, Germany)
    • Short Lecture Video:
    • Recording of Q&A session:
      /
  • 16:30-17:15 Live-Q&A-Session with Ayfer Özgür on her tutorial lecture Communication-Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Distributed Learning. Session chair: Stephan ten Brink (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
    • Lecture Video:
    • Recording of Q&A session:

Virtual Poster Sessions

Participants were strongly encouraged to present some of their recent work in online poster sessions and 23 posters were presented in total. Junior participants that may have not yet obtained publishable results were invited to present their thesis topics (including state-of-the-art and preliminary results) or survey posters.

The poster sessions were held in a format that resembled a real-live poster session as good as possible. They were not be recorded.

The posters are still on display in the virtual poster session and the link is still active!

Fees

All-inclusive online participation:

  • IEEE ITSoc members: free
  • IEEE members: 30
  • Non-IEEE members: 100 €
Schlossplatz (Stuttgart's main square) in front of the New Palace. Sadly, you didn't get to see this sight in person since the school was virtual.

The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) and Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) licenses for the stock photos used above can be found here and here, respectively.

 The ITSoc conference code of conduct as well as its statement on sexual harassment apply.

Organizers

This image shows Stephan ten Brink

Stephan ten Brink

Prof. Dr.-Ing.

Director

This image shows Christian  Senger

Christian Senger

Dr.-Ing.

Deputy Director

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