I would like to warmly welcome our readers to this inaugural special issue of JSAIT, the Information Theory Society’s first new journal since the IRE Transactions on Information Theory launched in 1953. The society’s desire to expand its technical scope, incubate new research directions, catalyze connections with other disciplines, and highlight new and emerging applications formed the impetus for the new journal. To achieve these goals, JSAIT publishes special issues focusing on the intersections of information theory with fields such as machine learning, statistics, biology, finance, computer science, and physics. There will also be special issues for emerging topics of broad interest that are firmly within Information Theory. Each special issue will have at least one tutorial aimed to benefit people in our field and to forge connections with people in other fields that information theory has impacted or can impact.