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Research in IE Department bags the 2016 Information Theory Society Paper Award

The paper titled "The Capacity Region of the Two-Receiver Gaussian Vector Broadcast Channel With Private and Common Messages", published in the Apr. 2014 issue of IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and co-authored by Yanlin Geng and Chandra Nair has received the award.

The above mentioned paper introduces a new method, radically different from existing ones, for proving the extremality of Gaussian distributions in a family of optimization problems associated with sub-additive functionals in a probability space.

This paper was written by Yanlin Geng, then a doctoral student under Prof. Nair’s supervision and now an assistant professor in Shanghai Tech, and Chandra Nair. Preliminary conference version of this work appeared in 2012. This paper is part of a larger body of work developed since 2008 regarding extremal distributions in information theory with the students and collaborators of Prof. Nair. This body of work has also resulted in showing the sub-optimality of the Han-Kobayashi region for interference channels (2011-2015) as well as developing a connection between tensorizing parameters in functional analysis and characterizations of the phenomenon using information measures (2013-2016), among other results.

This is the second time that researchers in IE department has received this prestigious award. Profs. Robert Li and Profs. Raymond Yeung obtained the award in 2005 for their work on Network Coding.

Description of the award:

The Information Theory Society Paper Award is given annually for an outstanding publication in the fields of interest to the Society appearing anywhere during the preceding two calendar years. The purpose of the Information Theory Paper Award is to recognize exceptional publications in the field and to stimulate interest in and encourage contributions to fields of interest of the Society.

You can see the list of all award winning papers across all the years here.