Student Committee Report

1
Student Committee Report
Aylin Yener, Penn State Presented at the BoG
meeting, CISS
2
Outline

• Previous Events
• ISIT 2008
• Allerton 2008
• Upcoming Events
• ISIT 2009
• General info and Outlook
• Second Annual School of Information Theory Update

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ISIT 2008, Toronto

• July 7, 2008 we organized a research discussion
  round table event for all participating students.
  
• 130 students attended the lunch event.
  Discussion leaders were
• Graphical models - Alex Dimakis (UC Berkeley)
• Source coding - Krish Eswaran (UC Berkeley)
• Feedback - Ramji Venkataramanan (University of
  Michigan)
• Interference and Secrecy - Xiang He (Penn State)
• Relaying - Bobak Nazer (UC Berkeley)
• Distributed detection and estimation - Anima
  Anandkumar (Cornell)
• Scaling laws - Awlok Josan (University of
  Michigan)
• Zero-error Information Theory - Salim El Rouayheb
  (Texas AM)
• Optimization - Chee Wei Tan (Princeton)

4
ISIT 2008, Toronto (2)

• July 10, 2008 we organized a panel discussion
  titled What Makes a Great Researcher?
• Panelist were Tom Cover and Andrea Goldsmith of
  Stanford, Sergio Verdu of Princeton University,
  Alon Orlitsky of UCSD and Alexander Barg of
  University of Maryland.
• 130 attendees. Lunch provided free IT student
  committee T-shirts were distributed to the
  participants.

5
Allerton 2008

• Joint event with the Outreach Committee
• Panel on Mentoring at Allerton library.
• Panelist were Todd Coleman (UIUC), Elza Erkip
  (Poly), Olgica Milenkovic (UIUC), Roy Yates
  (Rutgers), and Aylin Yener (Penn State).
• It was a good and interactive discussion.

6
Upcoming Events

• We decided not to hold the round table at CISS 09
  this year.
• CISS event (this decision is for this year) is to
  be replaced by an event at Asilomar or another
  venue, possibly an industry-student mixer.
• ISIT 09, round table, panel

7
Membership Update

• Retired members Brooke Shrader, Lalitha Sankar,
  Nan Liu
• New members Student co-chair Krish Eswaran
  (UCB) member Deniz Gunduz (Princeton/Stanford),
  Xiang He (Penn State) Web Matthieu Bloch
  (Notre Dame)

8
Forward look

• Volunteers
• We need to reach out to more volunteers to for
  student leadership as our membership rapidly
  grows.
• Student leaders Potential new members need to
  be sought as the current ones transition to
  post-student life.
• Please encourage your students and have them
  contact Aylin.
• Web
• The new ITSoc web-site is great!

9
Summary

• The student committee is alive and well with
  active enthusiastic volunteers and outstanding
  attendance at our events.
• Example Attendance at the ISIT events increased
  by more than 30 in 2008 as compared to 2007.
• More attendancehigher cost/event
• Despite this, we under spent our 15k budget by
  more than 5k last year.
• We shall be as frugal this year ?

10
Update Second Annual (North American) School of
Information Theory
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Organizing Committee for 2009

• Aylin Yener, Penn State
• Gerhard Kramer, USC
• Randy Berry, Northwestern
• Dongning Guo, Northwestern
• Daniela Tuninetti, UIC
• Natasha Devroye, UIC
• Yalin Sagduyu, Northwestern
• Matthieu Bloch, Notre Dame

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Goals and Procedure same as 2008!

• Any graduate student or post-doc eligible to
  apply.
• Students apply for the school with their
  presentation/poster title.
• Students will each give a 10min talk or present a
  poster.
• Cap 100 students (could go up a bit not to turn
  down too many applicants decision to be made
  after the application deadline).
• No registration Fee.
• Ideally NO COST to attendees.
• Reality As allowed by travel grants.
• New for 2009 Lodging available in the dorms.

13
Organization Update

• Northwestern classrooms will be used.
• Instructor list is complete.
• Application deadline was March 31, will likely be
  extended by two weeks (web based application form
  should be up soon on the web site).
• Emails encouraging advisors in the US and Canada
  to send their students will be sent shortly after
  the application form is live.
• Fundraising 10k from ITSoc 5k from NWU, we are
  trying more avenues.

14
Calendar, Location for 2009

• The Second Annual School of Information
  Theory will take place August 10 August 13,
  Thursday 2009 at the Northwestern University
  Campus, Evanston IL.

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(No Transcript)
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Keynote and Instructors

• Keynote Robert Gallager, MIT
• Instructors
• Abbas El Gamal, Stanford
• Bruce Hajek, UIUC
• Dan Costello, Notre Dame
• Note Abbas El Gamal is the Padovani Lecturer
  nominee.

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2009 Budget (100 students, 4 days)

• Lunches total
  8000
• Wednesday Barbecue 3500
• Breaks total
  4000
• Breakfasts total
  4500
• Easels, poster boards, badges, registration
  packets, mutimedia, 4000
• Instructor travel support 3500
• Contingency 2500
• TOTAL 30k, not including student travel grants.
• Most expensive item food (as in 2008).
• Students pay for lodging and dinners.

18
Funding Status

• Society 10k commitment (from the BoG meeting in
  Sept 08)
• New Northwestern Univ. M.S. in information
  technology program will support the school by 5k.
• We are cautiously optimistic about additional
  possibilities with token amounts that might yet
  come through.

19
Funding Status

• Motion The society commits an additional 10k in
  funding for the 2009 School of Information
  Theory.
• If approved, we are confident that we can run the
  school with no registration fee to attend.