Director

Professor Pascal Vontobel, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Pascal O. Vontobel received the Diploma degree in electrical engineering in 1997, the Post-Diploma degree in information techniques in 2002, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 2003, all from ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

From 1997 to 2002 he was a research and teaching assistant at the Signal and Information Processing Laboratory at ETH Zurich, from 2006 to 2013 he was a research scientist with the Information Theory Research Group at Hewlett–Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA, USA, and since 2014 he has been with the Department of Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he is currently a professor and the department chairman. Besides this, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (2002–2004), a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2004–2005), a postdoctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006), and a visiting scholar at Stanford University (2014). His research interests lie in coding and information theory, quantum information processing, data science, communications, and signal processing.

Dr. Vontobel was an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2009–2012), an Awards Committee Member of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2013–2014), a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2014–2015), an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications (2014–2017), and is currently a Thomas M. Cover Dissertation Award Committee Member of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2023–2025). Moreover, he was a TPC co-chair of the 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, the 2018 IEICE International Symposium on Information Theory and its Applications, and the 2018 IEEE Information Theory Workshop, along with being the director of the 2021 Croucher Summer Course in Information Theory, co-organizing several topical workshops, and being on the technical program committees of many international conferences. Furthermore, he was multiple times a plenary speaker at international information and coding theory conferences, he received an exemplary reviewer award from the IEEE Communications Society, and was awarded the ETH medal for his Ph.D. dissertation. He is an IEEE Fellow.

Co-director

Professor Sidharth Jaggi, University of Bristol

Bio: Sidharth (Sid) Jaggi received his B. Tech. from I.I.T. Bombay 2000, his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from CalTech in 2001 and 2006 respectively, all in EE. He spent 2006 as a Postdoctoral Associate at LIDS MIT. He joined the Department of Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2007, and the School of Mathematics at the University of Bristol in 2020. His interests lie at the intersection of network information theory, coding theory, and algorithms. His research group thus (somewhat unwillingly) calls itself the CAN-DO-IT team (Codes, Algorithms, Networks: Design and Optimization for Information Theory). Examples of topics he has dabbled in include network coding, sparse recovery/group-testing, covert communication, and his current obsession is with adversarial channels.

Advisory Committee