Information: From Theory to Practice
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Abstract

Information theory is a mathematical theory with inherent beauty, but with coding as its executive arm, practice has always been a lighthouse for the subject. However, the connection between theory and practice is at times obscure and may come in unexpected ways. In this lecture, I will try to explore this connection by reviewing my own research in the past more than three decades.

Biography
Raymond W. Yeung is a Choh-Ming Li Professor of Information Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He received his PhD degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University in 1988. Before joining CUHK in 1991, he was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He has been serving as Co-Director of the Institute of Network Coding at CUHK since 2010. His two textbooks on information theory have been adopted by over 100 institutions around the world. In 2014, he gave the first MOOC on information theory that has reached over 60,000 students to date. He has received a number of awards for his research contributions. These include the 2005 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2007, the 2016 IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award, the 2018 ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Paper Award, the 2021 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, and the 2022 Claude E. Shannon Award. In 2015, he was named an Outstanding Overseas Chinese Information Theorist by the China Information Theory Society. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences, and Hong Kong Institution of Engineers.