This 8th special issue will focus on exploring how new advances in information theory can impact future communication systems. Next generation wireless networks will incorporate a large number of devices, dense and intelligent antenna arrays, and operate in higher frequencies. New task-aware communication modalities, such as sensing, learning and inference, will accelerate the shift from human-to-human to machine-to-machine type communications. Accordingly, communication systems will be designed with capacity, latency and accuracy in mind. Increasingly complex communication tasks will need to be carried out on devices with energy and hardware constraints, but will also be able to take advantage of in-network storage and computation.