Claude Shannon Centenary Workshop successfully hosted by SIST

     On October 18, 2016, Claude Shannon Centenary Workshop was successfully held at ShanghaiTech. The workshop was hosted by ShanghaiTech’s School of Information Science and Technology (SIST) and co-organized by Shanghai Research Center for Wireless Communications (Wico).

      Claude Elwood Shannon (1916 – 2001) is universally considered as the father of Information Theory. He was an epoch-making visionary who laid the foundation of  Modern Communication Technology,  Digital Circuit Design Theory,  and Cryptography. Moreover, he was also known for his pioneering contribution in other fields, such as Graph Theory and Network Flows, Artificial Intelligence, Human-Machine Interaction, and Computational Biology. As Isaac Newton’s pioneering work in Calculus illuminated the road towards Industrial Era, Shannon’s work marked the prelude to the Information Era. Hence, it is meaningful to hold such a centenary workshop in memory of Shannon and his great work. 

      The workshop invited eight well-known scholars from related fields of Information Theory. They conducted an in-depth discussion on topics of Information Theory, Coding Theory, Networks, and Signal Processing. In the workshop, the first keynote speech was given by Prof. Shu Lin from UC Davis, who is a respectable and highly accomplished senior scholar in international academia. He talked about the old times when he worked with Shannon. Then he made a systematic and conclusive review about the efforts that people have paid in communication technology to achieve Shannon’s limit during the past seventy years. From a high-level perspective, he summarized that the rediscovery and retrospection of earlier works was an important source of later achievements in Information Theory. The second keynote speech was then given by Prof. Ping Li from City University of Hong Kong. His speech concentrated on the latest research achievements in the combination of Compressed and Coding Theory. Later, the other six talented young Chinese scholars also presented a series of impressive reports on their latest research results. For example, in the report by Prof. Chung Chan from Chinese University of Hong Kong, he revealed the duality between two classical algorithms in Machine Learning from the view of Information Theory. That was an instance of applications which showed how Shannon’s theory keeps up with the times in the era of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning. At the end of the workshop, researchers from Shanghai Research Center for Wireless Communications shared their latest industrial results.

      Guests attending the workshop included academic representatives from Shanghai Jiaotong University and Fudan University, as well as industrial representatives from Huawei, ZTE, Shanghai Advanced Research Institute (SARI) and Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology (SIMIT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).The successful hosting of the workshop promotes the exchange of views among domestic and foreign scholars, strengthens the collaboration between academia and industry, and expands ShanghaiTech’s influence in the field of Information Science and Technology.

     It is also remarkable that, so far in 2016, SIST has won three big awards in the fields of Information Theory and Communication Technology. The awards include the 2016 IEEE Eric Summer Award for Prof. NingCai, 2016 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award for Prof. Yanlin Geng, and 2016 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communication for Prof. Yuanming Shi. As a result, SIST has drawn significant attention from international academia.