In this article, we commemorate Joy Thomas, who sadly passed away in 2020. Joy is best known for his seminal textbook Elements of Information Theory, coauthored with his Ph.D. advisor the late Thomas Cover. We also catalog some of Joy’s [...]

One of Claude Shannon’s best remembered “toys” was his maze-solving machine, created by partitions on a rectangular grid. A mechanical mouse was started at one point in the maze with the task of finding cheese at another point. Relays under the board guided successive moves, each of which were taken in the first open counterclockwise direction from the previ...

The entropy function plays a central role in information theory. Constraints on the entropy function in the form of inequalities, viz. entropy inequalities (often conditional on certain Markov conditions imposed by the problem under consideration), are indispensable tools for proving converse coding theorems. In this expository article, we give an overview o...

Student researchers are an indispensable part of the IEEE Information Theory Society (ITSoc). If academic research is analogized with a communication system, then our faculty body constitutes the codebook, and our student body represents the codewords traveling through the medium of time, taking with them our most consequential messages and research outputs...

This new venture was made possible by generous support from the Board of Governors of the IT Society, and I appreciate their vision and leadership.  IEEE BITS looks to publish tutorial articles that view vibrant research areas like machine learning, wireless, quantum information science, and blockchains through an information-theoretic lens. We ar...