IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter Vol. 63, No. 4, December 2013 Editor: Tara Javidi ISSN 1059-2362 Editorial committee: Frank Kschischang, Giuseppe Caire, Meir Feder, Tracey Ho, Joerg Kliewer, Anand Sarwate, Andy Singer, and Sergio Verdú President’s Column Gerhard Kramer The 2013 Information Theory Workshop was nominate outstanding dissertations by held in Sevilla, Spain, in mid-September. Be- Jan. 15, 2014. Instructions can be found at fore the Workshop began, the Board of Gov- www.itsoc.org. ernors held their third and final meeting of the year to discuss and vote on a variety of 3) The ISIT Student Paper Award was issues concerning our Society. I would like renamed the IEEE Jack Keil Wolf ISIT to thank the members of the “core” team for Student Paper Award. I appreciate Paul their support during this eventful year: past Siegel’s efforts in managing the change. and future presidents Giuseppe Caire, Mu- riel Médard, Abbas El Gamal, Michelle Eff- 4) A Shannon stamp initiative was started ros, and Alon Orlitsky, treasurer Aylin Yener, at the suggestion of Sergio Verdú, and secretary Edmund Yeh, conference commit- Michelle Effros kindly agreed to orga- tee chair Elza Erkip, and editors-in-chief nize a web page with electronic signa- Helmut Bölcskei and Yiannis Kontoyiannis. tures. If you have not done so already, please add your support at http:// The December column gives opportunity to list some of the www.itsoc.org/about/shannons-centenary-us- important changes that the Board deemed useful and neces- postal-stamp sary for 2014. These changes were thoroughly discussed by an active and supportive Board, and I appreciate their con- 5) Two new Annual Schools of Information Theory were structive comments, criticisms, and suggestions throughout founded in Australia and East Asia. A third new School the year. will be held in India together with the established JTG Summer School. A fourth new School is planned for 1) Our Transactions papers will now receive “moderate/ South America. The new Schools will be funded in part light” editing. This change reduces our IEEE page charg- by tapping into our reserves for 2014. es from $57/page to $37/page (and reduces our publica- tion costs from $100/page to $80/page; we are budgeting 6) Five new initiatives were approved: an ISIT video 8500 pages for 2014; the Transactions costs will remain a event, a meet-the-Shannon-Awardee lunch event, a major issue in the near future). What this means, for WITHITS video initiative, and two online initiatives to instance, is that you will no longer have an editor check- enhance and sustain our media content. A sixth initia- ing your documents closely for grammar and spelling. tive on semi-automatic LaTeX-to-XML conversion is An important side effect is that the Associate Editor han- being coordinated with IEEE Publishing Operations. dling your paper may require you to pay for further editing on the order of $45/page. A future article by the 7) A new Membership committee was formed to con- 2014 Editor-in-Chief will give further information. solidate the efforts of three committees: the former Membership & Chapters, Student, and Outreach 2) A Thomas M. Cover Dissertation Award was estab- committees. The new Membership committee lished at the suggestion of Abbas El Gamal and with includes a new School subcommittee to support our the help of a committee led by Paul Siegel. The award will be given for the first time next year. Please continued on page 3 2 From the Editor Tara Javidi Dear IT Society members, a report on the First Workshop on Entropy and Information Inequality held in April, Amin Aminzadeh Gohari contrib- The last issue of 2013, naturally, contains uted the report on the First Iran Workshop on Communica- Gerhard Kramer’s last column as the IT tion and Information Theory held in May, and Emina Soljanin society president. Please join me in thank- prepared a report on the Dagstuhl Seminar on Coding Theory ing Gerhard for continuing the tradition held in August. These reports all attest to the vibrancy of our of excellence and growth as well as pre- society. paring a detailed report on our Society’s governance activities. With sadness, we As a reminder, announcements, news and events intended for pay tribute to my dear friend, colleague, both the printed newsletter and the website, such as award collaborator, and mentor, Professor Rene announcements, calls for nominations and upcoming con- Cruz, who passed away in June. This is a ferences, can be submitted jointly at the IT Society website loss for us at UCSD as well as for the IT http://www.itsoc.org/, using the quick links “Share News” and “Announce an Event.” society. I would very much like to thank Articles and columns also can be e-mailed to me at [email protected] with Bruce Hajek, Rene’s PhD advisor and close a subject line that includes the words “IT newsletter.” The next few deadlines are: friend, for preparing the tribute. Issue Deadline On a much happier note, we congratu- March 2013 January 10, 2014 late David Donoho who was awarded the June 2013 April 10, 2014 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences. In September 2013 July 10, 2014 addition to our popular and regular con- tributions by historian Ephremides and Please submit plain text, LaTeX or Word source files; do not worry about fonts or layout as puzzle-master Golomb, we have three ex- this will be taken care of by IEEE layout specialists. Electronic photos and graphics should cellent workshop reports. Babak Hassibi be in high resolution and sent as separate files. I look forward to hear your suggestions and Raymond Yeung have kindly prepared (especially regarding the new column) and contributions. IEEE Information Theory Table of Contents Society Newsletter President’s Column �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������1 IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter (USPS 360-350) is published quarterly by the From the Editor . 2 Information Theory Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. In Memorium: Rene Cruz ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������3 Headquarters: 3 Park Avenue, 17th Floor, The Historian’s Column. 4 New York, NY 10016-5997. David Donoho Receives Cost is $1.00 per member per year (included in Society fee) for each member of the 2013 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences. 5 Information Theory Society. Printed in the Report on the First Workshop U.S.A. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY and at additional mailing offices. on Entropy and Information Inequalities . 5 Postmaster: Send address changes to IEEE Report on the First Iran Workshop on Communication and Information Theory Society Newsletter, Information Theory (IWCIT 2013) �������������������������������������������������������������������7 IEEE, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854. Workshop Report: Dagstuhl Seminar on Coding © 2013 IEEE. Information contained in this newsletter may be copied without permis- Theory, August 25–30, Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany �������������������������������������8 sion provided that the copies are not made or Golomb’s Puzzle ColumnTM: Rep-Tile Sets ���������������������������������������������������9 distributed for direct commercial advantage, and the title of the publication and its date Golomb’s Puzzle ColumnTM: Combinatorial Counting Solutions �����������10 appear. Thomas M. Cover Dissertation Award ���������������������������������������������������������10 IEEE prohibits discrimination, harassment, and bullying. For more information, visit http://www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/ whatis/policies/p9-26.html. Call for Nominations ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������11 Call for Papers . 12 Call for Workshops . 17 SFI-00484 Conference Calendar ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������20 IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter December 2013 3 In Memorium: Rene Cruz The information theory community lost a dear connections into a single high-speed service. At friend and distinguished contributor last sum- the time of his death, Cruz was the company’s mer with the untimely death, on June 29, of Rene chief science officer. L. Cruz, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Cruz’s most recent research was in the emerg- Diego. Cruz was 54. ing field of “content-centric networking,” an al- ternative to the current host-centric architecture Rene was born and raised in Urbana where he ob- of the Internet, which aims to reduce congestion tained his bachelor’s degree at Illinois. After com- and complexity while enhancing speed and secu- pleting his master’s degree at MIT and working as rity. Specifically, he was investigating algorithms a senior engineer at Stanford Telecommunications, to distribute the message forwarding function he returned to Illinois for doctoral work with Bruce among network users so that each received the Hajek. Cruz’s 1987 dissertation laid the ground- content relevant to him or her. It’s unfortunate he work for his novel methodology of “network calcu- won’t be able to develop this work further. lus,” which enabled engineers to ascertain bounds on delay and buffering requirements in networks. After joining the Rene’s pioneering work was recognized by the IEEE INFOCOMM UCSD faculty in 1987, Cruz refined his dissertation work into a tan- Achievement Award (2009) for contributions to network calcu- dem of articles for the IEEE Transactions on