ABSTRACT: 

This presentation focuses on connections between relatively recent notions and variants of the Information Bottleneck and classical information theoretic frameworks, such as: Remote Source-Coding; Information Combining; Common Reconstruction; The Wyner-Ahlswede-Korner Problem; The Efficiency of Investment Information; CEO Source Coding under Log-Loss, Hypothesis Testing Error Exponent and others. We overview the uplink Cloud Radio Access Networks (CRAN) with oblivious processing, which is an attractive model for future wireless systems and highlight the basic connections to distributed Gaussian information bottleneck framework. For this setting, the optimal trade-offs between rates (i.e. complexity) and information (i.e. accuracy) in the discrete and vector Gaussian schemes is determined, taking an information-estimation viewpoint. Further, the performance cost of the simple 'oblivious' universal processing in CRAN systems is exemplified via novel bounding techniques. The concluding overview and outlook addresses in a unified way the dual problem of the privacy funnel and recent observations on the additive noise channels with a helper. Connections to the finite block length bottleneck features (related to the Courtade-Kumar conjecture) and entropy complexity measures (rather than mutual information) are shortly discussed. Some challenging problems are mentioned such as the characterization of the optimal power limited inputs (`features') maximizing the `relevance' for the Gaussian information bottleneck, under 'complexity' constraints. 

The talk is based mainly on joint research with A. Zaidi, I.E. Auguerri, G. Caire, O. Simeone and S-H. Park. The research of S. Shamai is supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme: No. 694630. 

BIO: 

Shlomo Shamai (Shitz) received the B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Technion---Israel Institute of Technology, in 1975, 1981 and 1986 respectively. During 1975-1985 he was with the Communications Research Labs, in the capacity of a Senior Research Engineer. Since 1986 he is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Technion---Israel Institute of Technology, where he is now a Technion Distinguished Professor, and holds the William Fondiller Chair of Telecommunications. His research interests encompasses a wide spectrum of topics in information theory and statistical communications.

Dr. Shamai (Shitz) is an IEEE Life Fellow, an URSI Fellow, a member of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities and a foreign member of the US National Academy of Engineering. He is the recipient of the 2011 Claude E. Shannon Award, the 2014 Rothschild Prize in Mathematics/Computer Sciences and Engineering and the 2017 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal. He is a co-recipient of the 2018 Third Bell Labs Prize for Shaping the Future of Information and Communications Technology.

He has been awarded the 1999 van der Pol Gold Medal of the Union Radio Scientifique Internationale (URSI), and is a co-recipient of the 2000 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award, the 2003, and the 2004 joint IT/COM societies paper award, the 2007 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award, the 2009 and 2015 European Commission FP7, Network of Excellence in Wireless COMmunications (NEWCOM++, NEWCOM#) Best Paper Awards, the 2010 Thomson Reuters Award for International Excellence in Scientific Research, the 2014 EURASIP Best Paper Award (for the EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking), the 2015 IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award the 2018 IEEE Signal Processing Best Paper Award and the 2022 IEEE Communications Society Outstanding Paper Award. Dr. Shamai (Shitz) is listed as a Highly Cited Researcher (Computer Science) for the years 2013/4/5/6/7/8. He is also the recipient of 1985 Alon Grant for distinguished young scientists and the 2000 Technion Henry Taub Prize for Excellence in Research. He has served as Associate Editor for the Shannon Theory of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, and has also served twice on the Board of Governors of the Information Theory Society. He has also served on the Executive Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, on the IEEE Information Theory Society Nominations and Appointments Committee and on the IEEE Information Theory Society, Shannon Award Committee.