Information Theory Society Awards Committee Report

1. Information Theory Society Awards Committee Report Chair: Andrea Goldsmith IT Society BOG MeetingJuly 6, 2008ISIT Toronto, CA

2. Committee Members • Frank Kschischang (2nd VP, Ex-Officio) • Ning Cai • Robert Calderbank • Anne Canteaut • Suhas Diggavi • Tuvi Etzion • Michael Honig • Ioannis Kontoyiannis • Upamanyu Madhow • Andreas Winter

3. Paper Awards • The awards committee handles 3 paper awards: • The IT paper award • Papers published in IT Transactions in 2006 or 2007 • The joint IT/Comsoc paper award • Papers published in any IT or Comsoc journal in 2007 • The ISIT 2008 student paper award • Papers accepted to ISIT’08 with a student as main contributor are eligible • Committee also actively solicited nominations for the IEEE Fink (tutorial) prize paper award

4. Current Status • The winner of the joint IT/Comsoc paper has been decided. • We have made a recommendation for the IT paper award • Motion to be presented • The committee has selected the ISIT student paper award finalists • Final winners decided at ISIT and announced at the Thursday banquet

5. Joint IT/Comsoc Paper AwardNominations • In prior years there was a dearth of nominations • One last year • Committee made a significant effort to solicit more nominations • Call for nominations published in newsletter, website, and twice on the BoG mailing list • Nominations requested from IT AEs • Nominations requested from committee • Received 6 nominations

6. Joint IT/Comsoc Paper AwardProcess • This paper award was handled first to meet Comsoc’s deadline to annouce at ICC • IT awards committee selects 1-2 finalist papers from nominated papers • Comsoc awards committee selects 1-2 finalist papers from nominated papers • A subcommittee with 2 members each from IT and Comsoc selects the final winner(s) – up to 2. • Winner was decided in May and was announced on IT/Comsoc websites and at ICC • Will also be announced at ISIT awards lunch

7. Joint IT/Comsoc Paper AwardFinalist Papers • Email discussion and 2 votes conducted • One paper finalist nominated by our committee “Hierarchical Cooperation Achieves Optimal Capacity Scaling in Ad Hoc Networks” by Ayfer Özgür, Olivier Lévêque, and David Tse, IEEE Trans. Information Theory, Vol. 53, No. 10, Oct. 2007. • One paper finalists nominated by Comsoc “Accumulate-Repeat-Accumulate Codes” by Aliazam Abbasfar, Dariush Divsalar and Kung Yao, IEEE Trans. on Commun., Vol. 55, No. 4, April 2007.

8. Joint IT/Comsoc Paper AwardFinal Decision • Subcommittee appointed by Comsoc and IT Awards Committee Chairs: • IT: Mike Honig andFrank Kschischang • Comsoc: Reinaldo Valenzuela and Ray Pickoltz (chair). • A conference call and extensive email discussions led to final decision. • The paper selected for the award was “Accumulate-Repeat-Accumulate Codes” by Abbasfar, Divsalar, and Yao.

9. Joint IT/Comsoc Paper AwardIssues • Cross-nominations between IT/joint award • Can a paper be nominated for both awards? • Should it be precluded that the same paper win both the joint award and IT award? • Decision in time for ICC announcement • One year window for the award • Subcommittee of four may be too small

10. Straw-Man Proposal • Cross-nominations between IT and joint IT/Comsoc allowed • Once a paper has won one award, it should be ineligible for the other. • Timing of awards should be decoupled • Joint award decided first. • Subcommittee size should be seven • Chair alternates between societies • One-year window (with a shift?) is OK.

11. Joint IT/Comsoc Paper AwardBylaws • Joint award currently not in the bylaws • Committee will make a recommendation for a bylaw amendment at Allerton • Based on sentiment to straw-man proposal

12. ISIT Student Paper AwardsProcess • Recommendations from TPC chairs solicited: only 2 received (how to improve?) • ISIT TPC sent awards committee a list of all eligible papers with reviews and papers (2000 pages) and a spreadsheet • The committee struggled to find best candidates with this format of information • Better interface between TPC and awards committee needed (will recommend at ISIT)

13. ISIT Student Paper Awards Finalists • New bounds on the information-theoretic key agreement of multiple terminals by A.A. Gohari and V. Anantharam • Linear programming bounds for unitary space time codes by J. Creignou and H. Diet • Exchange of Limits: Why Iterative Decoding Works by S. B. Korada and R. Urbanke • A New Channel Coding Achievability Bound by Y. Polyanskiy, H.V. Poor, and S. Verdu • Communication Requirements for Generating Correlated Random Variables by P. Cuff

14. ISIT Student Paper Awards Selecting the winners • The awards committee will review the finalist presentations at ISIT • Paper award winner(s) will be decided based on paper and presentation quality • Will announce the winner(s) at ISIT banquet

15. ISIT Student Paper AwardsIssues • COI: • TPC concerned about (appearance of) COI • Resolved by putting all responsibility with the awards committee (all TPC papers eligible) • Eligibility: • Should papers based on thesis work be eligible • May dilute the purpose of the award and could create confusion/room for interpretation • Current criterion that an author be a registered student at the time of paper submission is best

16. ISIT Student Paper AwardsIssues • TPC Involvement: • Would have been helpful for the committee to get more finalists recommendations from the TPC: • Only received 2, 5-10 would have been better • Should be more emphasis on generating nominations during the review process. • TPC should be more involved and/or handle the award • Information Exchange: • Format of information committee received was very difficult to work with (initially a 2000 page document). • Need to standardize the format for information exchange

17. Straw Man Proposal(s) • The award is handled by a subcommittee of the ISIT TPC • Large enough so that dropouts due to conflicts of interest leave it functional. •  The award is handled by a subcommittee of awards committee and TPC members • To ensure continuity of process and benefit of experience from year to year

18. IT Paper AwardNominations • Call for nominations published in newsletter, website, and BoG mailing list • Nominations requested from IT AEs • The committee received a total of 15 nominations for 10 papers from the publications committee. • One additional paper nominated internally for a total of 11 papers to consider • Much deliberation and several votes to narrow it down to four finalists

19. IT Paper AwardFinalist Papers • "Compressed Sensing", by David Donoho, IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, Vol. 52, No. 4, pp 1289-1306, April 2006. • "Near-optimal signal recovery from random projections: universal encoding strategies?”, by Emmanuel Candes and Terence Tao, IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, Vol. 52, No. 12, pp 5406-5425, December 2006. • “A random linear network coding approach to multicast,” by T. Ho, M. Medard, R. Koetter, D. R. Karger, M. Effros, J. Shi, and B. Leong, IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, Vol. 52,  No. 10,  pp. 4413 – 4430, Oct. 2006 • “Networks, matroids, and non-Shannon information inequalities,” by R. Dougherty, C. Freiling, and K. Zeger, IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, Vol. 53, No. 6, pp. 1949-1969, June 2007

20. IT Paper AwardCommittee Recommendation • The committee unanimously recommends that the 2008 IT paper award be given to "Compressed Sensing" by David Donoho and "Near-optimal signal recovery from random projections: universal encoding strategies?” by Emmanuel Candes and Terence Tao

21. Basis of Recommendation • These ground-breaking papers independently introduce the area of compressed sensing, which establishes that if an unknown signal is compressible in some basis and a specific nonlinear reconstruction algorithm is used, the number of samples (measurements) needed for signal recovery can be dramatically smaller than the dimensionality of the original signal. This new branch of detection and estimation holds great promise for processing massive amounts of data, and has already had a broad impact on a diverse set of fields, including signal processing, information theory, function approximation, MRI, radar design, and sigma-delta conversion. • It is rare that a paper establishes a new field, is technically deep, and touches so many different fields. The Donoho and Candes-Tao papers are in this category

22. Acknowledgement • Acknowledge the role of the paper “Robust uncertainty principles: Exact signal reconstruction from highly incomplete frequency information” by Emmanuel Candès, Justin Romberg, and Terence Tao, published in the IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, Vol. 52, No. 2, pp. 489 - 509, Feb. 2006 in developing some of the preliminary ideas that sparked the field of compressed sensing.

23. We are not following the Bylaws for IT Paper Award By March 15, the chair of the Publications Committee or designee shall forward to the First Vice President a list of at least nine articles, published in the previous calendar year, for the consideration of the Awards Committee. Each nomination shall be accompanied by a statement outlining the contribution of the paper.The Awards Committee shall take into account (a) all nominations submitted in response to the open call for nominations in the last two years; (b) the nominations supplied by the Publications Committee in the last two years; (c) any nomination that its members may want to submit for consideration.

24. Current procedure • Nominations from open call sent to EIC • EIC adds AE nominations • EIC sends combined list to awards committee chair (total of 9 this year) • Should we follow bylaws or change them? • Do we need a separate list from Pubs committee which is held for two years? • Should there be a minimum number of nominations from the Pubs committee?

25. Baker Prize • The IEEE Awards Board decided recently to recommend discontinuing the Baker prize • Prize for the most outstanding paper in any IEEE publication in a given year • Officers discussed trying to reinstate it. • Proposal presented to the IEEE Awards Board in Feb. • Awards Board passed a motion reiterating its recommendation to terminate to Board of Directors • At recent IEEE TAB meeting there was strong support among 7 societies for reinstituting the award.

26. Motion • The IEEE Information Theory Society, in partnership with other societies, strongly supports the continuation of the historic W. R. G. Baker Prize Paper Award. We are prepared to support modifications in its terms to adapt the award to current conditions and to make it easier to administer, such as restricting the award to fundamental theory papers and broadening the time window to five years so as better to assess impact. The IT Society will commit to providing one member to the selection committee every year, and will provide a proportionate amount of the cost of administering the award (now estimated at $5000 per year, or the equivalent in endowment).

27. Other Awards • Committee responsible for 3 nominations to IEEE Fink paper award • Committee also nominated Jacob Ziv for BBVA award.

28. Committee Load • Handling 3 paper awards, soliciting Fink award nominations and BBVA nominations a lot of work • DL recommendations may also be handled by this committee • Perhaps the committee should be split • To be discussed at Allerton