2017 IEEE Information Theory Society
Board of Governors Election
Term: January 1, 2018 - December 31, 2020
Helmut Bölcskei was born in Mödling, Austria on May 29, 1970, and received the Dipl.-Ing.
and Dr. techn. degrees in electrical engineering from Vienna University of Technology,
Vienna, Austria, in 1994 and 1997, respectively. In 1998 he was with Vienna University of
Technology. From 1999 to 2001 he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Information
Systems Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering, and in the Department of
Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA. He was in the founding team of Iospan
Wireless Inc., a Silicon Valley-based startup company (acquired by Intel Corporation in
2002) specialized in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems for highspeed Internet access, and was a co-founder of Celestrius AG, Zurich, Switzerland. From
2001 to 2002 he was an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been with ETH Zurich since 2002, where he is a
Professor of Electrical Engineering. He was a visiting researcher at Philips Research
Laboratories Eindhoven, The Netherlands, ENST Paris, France, and the Heinrich Hertz
Institute Berlin, Germany. His research interests are in information theory, mathematical
signal processing, machine learning, and statistics.
He received the 2001 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award, the
2006 IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Best Paper Award, the 2010
Vodafone Innovations Award, the ETH "Golden Owl" Teaching Award, is a Fellow of the
IEEE, a 2011 EURASIP Fellow, was a Distinguished Lecturer (2013-2014) of the IEEE
Information Theory Society, an Erwin Schrödinger Fellow (1999-2001) of the Austrian
National Science Foundation (FWF), was included in the 2014 Thomson Reuters List of
Highly Cited Researchers in Computer Science, and is the 2016 Padovani Lecturer of the
IEEE Information Theory Society. He served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions
on Information Theory, the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, the IEEE Transactions
on Wireless Communications, and the EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing. He
was editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory during the period
2010-2013. He served on the editorial board of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine and is
currently on the editorial boards of "Foundations and Trends in Networking” and
"Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory”. He was TPC cochair of the 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory and the 2016 IEEE
Information Theory Workshop and serves on the Board of Governors of the IEEE
Information Theory Society. He has been a delegate of the president of ETH Zurich for
faculty appointments since 2008.
Sueli I. R. Costa, Professor in the Institute of Mathematics, University of Campinas-Brazil,
received her Ph.D. from the same university and had her postdoctoral studies at the
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Activities related to research development include
the coordination of the Thematic Project "Information Theory and Coding" FAPESP and
serving as general co-chair of the 2011 IEEE ITW-Information Theory Workshop, ParatyBrazil, as one of the organizers of the SP Coding and Information School, 2015 and of the
Latin American Week on Coding and Information, to be held in Campinas, Brazil, July 2018
and currently as chair of the IEEE-IT Soc. Brazil Chapter. Her research topics of interest are
lattice codes and applications, discrete and continuous spherical codes, coding for storage
and information geometry. Coauthored works on these topics include papers in the IEEE
Trans. Inform. Theory, Discrete Applied Mathematics, Linear Algebra and its Applications,
Journal of Number Theory, Designs, Codes and Cryptography and presentations at the IEEE
ISIT, ITW, ITA and WCC conferences.
Albert Guillén i Fàbregas was born in Barcelona in 1974. In 1999 he received the
Telecommunication Engineering Degree and the Electronics Engineering Degree from
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and Politecnico di Torino, respectively, and the Ph.D.
in Communication Systems from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in
2004. Since 2011 he has been a Research Professor of the Institució Catalana de Recerca i
Estudis Avançats (ICREA) at the Department of Information and Communication
Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He is also Adjunct Research Faculty at the
Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, where he was a Reader and a Fellow
of Trinity Hall. He has held appointments at the New Jersey Institute of Technology,
Telecom Italia, European Space Agency (ESA), Institut Eurécom, University of South
Australia, as well as visiting appointments at Ecole Nationale des Télécommunications
(Paris), Universitat Pompeu Fabra, University of South Australia, Centrum Wiskunde &
Informatica and Texas A&M University in Qatar. His research interests are in information
theory, coding theory and communication theory.
Dr. Guillén i Fàbregas received the Starting and Consolidator Grants from the European
Research Council, the Young Authors Award of the 2004 European Signal Processing
Conference, the 2004 Best Doctoral Thesis Award from the Spanish Institution of
Telecommunications Engineers, and a Research Fellowship of the Spanish Government to
join ESA. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and of
the Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory, Now Publishers.
He was a General Co-Chair of the 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Information
Theory, held in Barcelona. He is also a Senior Member of IEEE, a member of the Young
Academy of Europe and was an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless
Communications (2007-2011).
Stephen Hanly received his B.Sc. (Hons) and M.Sc. from the University of Western
Australia, and the Ph.D. degree in mathematics in 1994 from Cambridge University, UK.
From 1993 to 1995, he was a Post-doctoral member of technical staff at AT&T Bell
Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA. From 1996 to 2009 he was on the research
and teaching staff at the University of Melbourne, and between 2010 and 2011 he was an
Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore. He returned to Australia in
2012 to take up the CSIRO-Macquarie University Chair in Wireless Communications at
Macquarie University.
Prof. Hanly was a co-recipient of the 1998 IEEE Infocom best paper award, a co-recipient of
the IEEE Information Theory Society and IEEE Communication Society joint best paper
award in 2001, and a co-recipient of the 2015 IEEE Communications Society best tutorial
paper award. He was an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless
Communications from 2005-2009, a guest editor for the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas
in Communications special issue on “Cooperative Communications in MIMO Cellular
Networks'' in 2010, and for the special issue on “5G Wireless Communication Systems” in
2014. He was a guest editor for EURASIP Journal of Wireless Communications and
Networking, special issue on “Recent Advances in Optimization Techniques in Wireless
Communication Networks” in 2012. He was the technical co-chair of the IEEE
International Symposium on Information Theory in 2005, and again in 2017, and the
technical co-chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory and its
Applications (ISITA) in 2014. He was the General Chair of the Australian Communication
Theory Workshop (AusCTW) in 2014, and of the IEEE Communication Theory Workshop in
2017. He is currently a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory
Society, and a Fellow of the IEEE.
Ashish Khisti is presently an Associate Professor and a Canada Research Chair (Tier II) at
the University of Toronto, Canada. He also received his BASc Degree from University of
Toronto, and his S.M and Ph.D. Degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
Ashish presently serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information
Theory. He recently served as a guest editor for the Proceedings of the IEEE (Special Issue
on Secure Communications via Physical-Layer and Information-Theoretic Techniques).
Ashish also serves on the board of directors for the Canadian Society of Information
Theory. He has actively volunteered in organizing a number of workshops and conferences
including 1) Workshop on “Mathematical Coding Theory in Multimedia Streaming” at the
Banff International Research Station (BIRS) with J. Rosenthal, H. Gluesing-Luerssen and E.
Soljanin in 2015 2) Workshop on “Interactive Information Theory” at BIRS with Natasha
Devroye and Ian Blake in 2011 3) Symposium on "Control & Information Theoretic
Approaches to Privacy and Security" in IEEE GlobalSIP Conference in 2017 with Aditya
Mahajan and Rafael Schaefer and 4) Workshop on Physical-layer Methods for Wireless
Security at IEEE CNS Conference with Professor Lifeng Lai. In addition, Ashish also served
as the local arrangements chair for the 2013 Canadian Workshop in Information Theory,
and the 2014 North American School on Information Theory, both in Toronto, Canada.
His current research interests include information theoretic security and streaming
communication systems. He is a recipient of an Early Researcher Award from the province
of Ontario, the Hewlett-Packard Innovation Research Award, a Cisco Research Center
Award and the Harold H. Hazen teaching assistant award from MIT. His papers have over
5,000 citations on Google scholar. He served as a consultant to Cisco Systems, USA between
2015-2017 in the area of streaming communication systems.
Negar Kiyavash is Willett Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. She is a joint Associate Professor of Industrial and Enterprise Engineering and
Electrical and Computer Engineering. She is also affiliated with the Coordinated Science
Laboratory (CSL) and the Information Trust Institute. She received her Ph.D. degree in
electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in
2006. Her research interests are in design and analysis of algorithms for network inference
and security. She is a recipient of National Science Foundation’s CAREER and The Air Force
Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator awards, and the Illinois College of
Engineering Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research.
She has served on the technical program committee of the IEEE International Symposium
on Information Theory (ISIT) and as its finance chair. She is a member of the organizing
committee for the Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing and has
organized invited sessions for both Allerton and Information Theory Workshops (ITW).
She served as a member of the Ad-hoc Committee to Review Structure of the Membership
& Chapters Committee (MCC) in 2013. She was the committee chair for Women in the
Information Theory Society (WITHTS), the representative of the IT Society in Women in
Engineering (WIE), and a member of the IT Society Membership and Chapters Committee
from 2012 to 2015.
Haim Permuter (M'08-SM'13) received his B.Sc. summa cum laude and M.Sc. summa cum
laude degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Ben-Gurion University,
Israel, in 1997 and 2003, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from
Stanford University, California in 2008.
Between 1997 and 2004, he was an officer at a research and development unit of the Israeli
Defense Forces. Since 2009 he is with the department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering at Ben-Gurion University where he is currently an associate professor.
Prof. Permuter is a recipient of several awards, among them the Fullbright Fellowship, the
Stanford Graduate Fellowship (SGF), Allon Fellowship, and the U.S.-Israel Binational
Science Foundation Bergmann Memorial Award. Haim served on the editorial boards of the
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory in 2013-2016.
H. Vincent Poor is the Michael Henry Strater University Professor of Electrical Engineering
at Princeton University. Prior to joining the Princeton faculty in 1990, he was on the faculty
of the University of Illinois. He has also held visiting appointments at several other
universities, including most recently at Berkeley and Cambridge. His research interests
include information theory and signal processing, with applications in wireless networks
and related fields. Among his publications in these areas is the recent book, Information
Theoretic Security and Privacy of Information Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Vince is an IEEE Fellow and a member of the NAE, the NAS and the Royal Society. He served
as President of the IT Society in 1990, as EIC of the IT Transactions in 2004-07, and as
General Co-Chair of ISIT 2009, held in Seoul. Recent recognition of his work includes the
2017 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, and honorary doctorates and professorships
from several universities, including from Syracuse in 2017.
Andrew Thangaraj received his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute
of Technology (IIT), Madras, India in 1998 and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA in 2003. He was a post-doctoral researcher at
the GTL-CNRS Telecom lab at Georgia Tech Lorraine, Metz, France from August 2003 to
May 2004. From June 2004, he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT
Madras, where he is currently a professor. Since Jan 2012, he has been serving as Editor
for the IEEE Transactions on Communications. His research interests are in the broad areas
of information theory, error-control coding and information-theoretic aspects of
cryptography.
Daniela Tuninetti is currently a Professor within the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), which she joined in
2005. She got her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2002 from ENST/Telecom ParisTech
(Paris, France, with work done at the Eurecom Institute in Sophia Antipolis, France),
and she was a postdoctoral research associate at the School of Communication and
Computer Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL,
Lausanne, Switzerland) from 2002 to 2004.
Dr. Tuninetti is a recipient of a best paper award at the European Wireless Conference in
2002, of an NSF CAREER award in 2007, and named UIC University Scholar in 2015.
Dr. Tuninetti's research interests are in the ultimate performance limits of wireless
interference networks (with special emphasis on cognition and user cooperation),
coexistence between radar and communication systems, multi-relay networks, contenttype coding, and caching systems.
Dr. Tuninetti was the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Information Theory Society
Newsletter from 2006 to 2008, an editor for IEEE Communication Letters from 2006
to 2009, and for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications from 2011 to 2014;
she is currently an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. She is
currently the IEEE Information Theory Society treasurer.
Tsachy Weissman (S’99–M’02–SM’07–F’13) graduated summa cum laude in 1997 with a
B.Sc. from the Technion Department of Electrical Engineering, from which he also earned
his Ph.D. in 2001. He then worked at Hewlett Packard Laboratories with the information
theory group until 2003, when he joined Stanford University, where he is currently
Professor of Electrical Engineering and incumbent of the STMicroelectronics chair in the
School of Engineering. He has spent leaves at the Technion, and at ETH Zurich. Tsachy’s
research is focused on information theory, compression, communication, statistical signal
processing, the interplay between them, and their applications. He is recipient of several
best paper awards, and prizes for excellence in research and teaching. He served on the
editorial board of the IEEE Transactins on Information Theory from Sept. 2010 to Aug.
2013, and currently serves on the editorial board of Foundations and Trends in
Communications and Information Theory. He is Founding Director of the Stanford
Compression Forum.
Aylin Yener is a professor of Electrical Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University
since 2010, and a Dean’s fellow since 2017. She is currently also a visiting professor of
Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. She joined Penn State’s faculty as an
assistant professor in 2002, and was an associate professor 2006-2010. She was also a
visiting associate professor at Stanford during the academic year 2008-2009. In the
summer of 2016, she was a visiting researcher at Telecom Paris Tech. She received the B.Sc.
degree in electrical and electronics engineering, and the B.Sc. degree in physics, from
Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey; and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and
computer engineering from Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB), Rutgers
University, New Brunswick, NJ. Yener received the CAREER award from the National
Science Foundation in 2003, and was a member of the young investigator team on the
DARPA program for Information Theory for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (ITMANET) 20062011. Her research recognitions include the 2014 IEEE Marconi paper award. She is a
fellow of the IEEE.
Yener’s service to IEEE includes being technical program chair of various conferences for
the IEEE Communications Society, an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on
Communications, an associate editor and an editorial advisory board member for the IEEE
Transactions on Wireless Communications, and a senior editor for the Journal on Selected
Areas in Communications.
Yener’s research interests are in information theory, fundamental performance limits of
networked systems, information security and energy harvesting communications. In
particular, she continues to advocate for the impact of information theory on design
insights and understanding of networked and complex systems.
Her service to IEEE Information Theory Society includes various positions in organizing
ISIT 2011, 2012 and 2013. She was the student committee chair for the IEEE Information
Theory Society 2007-2011, and was the co-founder of the Annual School of Information
Theory in North America (with Gerhard Kramer), co-organizing the school in years 2008,
2009 and 2010. She was the treasurer of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 20122014. She is currently a member of the Board of Governors for 2015-2017, and is
serving as the information theory schools subcommittee chair.
Wei Yu (S'97-M'02-SM'08-F’14) received the B.A.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering and
Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in 1997 and M.S.
and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 1998
and 2002, respectively. Since 2002, he has been with the Electrical and Computer
Engineering Department at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where he
is now Professor and holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Information Theory and
Wireless Communications. His main research interests include network information
theory, optimization, wireless communications and broadband access networks.
Prof. Wei Yu served on the IEEE Information Theory Society Board of Governors (2015-
2017). He served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
(2010-2013), as an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Communications (2009-2011), as an
Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (2004-2007), and as a Guest
Editor for a number of special issues for the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in
Communications and the EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing. He was a
Technical Program Committee (TPC) co-chair of the Communication Theory Symposium at
the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) in 2012, a TPC co-chair of the
IEEE Communication Theory Workshop in 2014, and the Finance Chair for the IEEE
International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) in 2008. He is currently the Chair of
the Signal Processing for Communications and Networking Technical Committee of the
IEEE Signal Processing Society (2008-2013). He will be a TPC co-chair of ISIT 2020.
Prof. Wei Yu received a Journal of Communications and Networks Best Paper Award in
2017, a Steacie Memorial Fellowship in 2015, an IEEE Communications Society Best
Tutorial Paper Award in 2015, an IEEE ICC Best Paper Award in 2013, an IEEE Signal
Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2008, a McCharles Prize for Early Career Research
Distinction in 2008, an Early Career Teaching Award from the Faculty of Applied Science
and Engineering, University of Toronto in 2007, and an Early Researcher Award from
Ontario in 2006. He is recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher. Prof. Wei Yu is a registered
Professional Engineer in Ontario. He is a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of Canadian Academy
of Engineering.