
The 2024 North American School of Information Theory (NASIT 2024) was held in Ottawa, Canada, from July 28th to August 2nd, 2024. The event was hosted on the campus of the University of Ottawa, in the scenic capital city of Canada. There were over 50 registered participants, including a mix of postgraduate students, postdoctoral associates, and researchers from Canada, United States, and Europe and Asia.Ìý
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The event began with a welcome reception on a cruise tour on the Ottawa River, on the evening of July 28th.Ìý The programme consisted of ten tutorials throughout the week, centered around modern topics of information theory and particularly their intersection with and applications in data science.Ìý The tutorials include:
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- Meir Feder (Tel Aviv University), Addressing Large Models: Multiple and Hierarchical UniversalityÌý
- Jona Balle (Google Research), Learned Data Compression, and New Solutions to Old Problems
- Hamed Hassani (University of Pennsylvania): Alignment of Machine Learning Models: From CNNs to LLMsÌý
- Flavio Calmon (Harvard University), A World of Divergences
- Yuejie Chi (Carnegie Mellon University), Generative Priors in Data Science: From Low-rank to Diffusion Models
- Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali (University of Minnesota Twin Cities), Blockchains, Decentralized Learning, and Game of Coding
- Oliver Kosut(Arizona State University), An Information-theoretic Perspective on Privacy Measures
- Gauri Joshi (Carnegie Mellon University), Federated Learning in the Presence of Data, Communication and Computational Heterogeneity
- Jun Chen (McMaster University), Lossy Data Compression using Deep Learning
- Yingbin Liang (The Ohio State University), Theory on Transformer Training
Lunch periods were made concurrent with poster sessions, where participants had opportunities to present their own research, interact with each other and chat with the speakers. The participants went on an excursion to the beautiful Gatineau Park on the afternoon of July 30th. An unexpected roadblock did not stop the courageous participants, who ended up hiking over 12 kilometers in the woods.Ìý
On the evening of August 1st, a banquet was held at Al’s Steakhouse in downtown Ottawa, and the event concluded after the morning tutorial on August 2nd.
The event was made possible due to the generous support from the 91³Ô¹ÏÍø Information Theory Society, the Canadian Society of Information Theory, the Fields Institute, the University of Ottawa, and Marsbay Corporation. The organization committee was chaired by Yongyi Mao (University of Ottawa) and included Shahab Asoodeh (McMaster University), Sadaf Saleh (University of Manitoba), Chen Feng (University of British Columbia at Okanagan), Tom Cesari (University of Ottawa), Ziqiao Wang (Tongji University), Zhiyi Dong (University of Ottawa) and Stark Draper (University of Toronto).