What Is the Information Theory Society?

The Information Theory Society is the IEEE technical society dedicated to advancing the mathematical foundations of information technology. Its scope covers the processing, transmission, storage, and use of information, along with the theoretical underpinnings of communication systems. The society serves as the primary professional home for researchers and engineers working on source coding, channel coding, cryptography, statistical inference, and related mathematical areas that trace their origins to Claude Shannon's foundational work in the late 1940s.

Founded as the Professional Group on Information Theory in 1951, the society grew out of the early community that formed around Shannon's 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." It became a full IEEE society and has since grown to several thousand members distributed across academia, government research laboratories, and industry.

Publications

The society's principal publication is the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, widely considered the flagship journal of the field. The Transactions publishes original research on all aspects of information theory, including fundamental bounds on compression and channel capacity, network information theory, and connections to statistics and machine learning. The society also publishes the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory (JSAIT), which accepts papers in response to focused calls on emerging topics, and IEEE BITS, a magazine format publication featuring tutorial articles that approach broad research areas through an information-theoretic lens. The IT Society Newsletter has been issued since the society's early years and informs members of technical developments, awards, and society news.

Conferences and Technical Meetings

The IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) is the society's flagship annual conference. ISIT began with a 1950 symposium in London and has since grown into a large international gathering at which researchers present original contributions across source coding, channel coding, communication theory, cryptography, detection and estimation, network information theory, and learning. The society also co-sponsors or affiliates with a number of specialized workshops, including the IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW) and events focused on topics such as coded computing and information-theoretic security.

Technical Scope and Awards

The society supports technical work spanning both foundational mathematics and applications to engineering systems. Its technical committees cover areas including source and channel coding, communication theory, cryptography and security, statistics, and network information theory. The society administers several prestigious awards, including the Claude E. Shannon Award, given annually since 1972 to individuals who have made consistent and profound contributions to the field, and the IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award, which recognizes outstanding publications in the Transactions and other society venues. A full description of the society's awards and governance is available at the IEEE Information Theory Society homepage.

Applications

The Information Theory Society supports research with applications in a wide range of disciplines, including:

• Wireless and wireline telecommunications standards based on capacity-approaching codes
• Lossless and lossy data compression for storage and streaming media
• Cryptographic protocol design and information-theoretic security analysis
• Machine learning theory and statistical inference foundations
• Quantum information processing and quantum communication