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Quantum technologies are maturing by the day and making exciting advances across computing, communications, networking, sensing, and beyond. The critical path to scaling these technologies for a practical advantage over classical systems involves the implementation of fault tolerant procedures. The most established fault tolerance framework uses quantum error correcting codes and decoders. The theory of quantum error correction has recently produced codes with optimal parameters that could potentially reduce the resource overhead of fault tolerance. However, several challenges remain to be addressed before these theoretical advances lead to scalable, fault tolerant, practical quantum systems. Besides computing, error correction techniques are necessary for other applications as well. The goal of this special issue is to invite previously unpublished work in the broad areas of quantum error correction and fault tolerance with connections to classical and quantum information theory.

Manuscript submission deadline: October 31, 2024

This special issue is focused on novel communication frameworks that fully exploit the physics of electromagnetic waves. These emerging technologies include holographic MIMO, super-directive antenna array, extremely large antenna arrays, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, orbital angular momentum (OAM) multiplexing, etc. To explore both potentials and limitations of these technologies, research into electromagnetic and information theory (EIT) is actively underway in both academia and industry. EIT is an interdisciplinary framework integrating electromagnetic wave (EM) theory and information theory (IT) for the analysis of physical systems for the communication, processing, and storage of information.

Submission deadline extended to Sept 10, 2024 (original manuscript submission deadline: 15 August 2024).

This special issue of the �������� Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory is dedicated to the memory of Toby Berger, one of the most important information theorists of our time, who passed away in 2022 at the age of 81. He made foundational contributions to a wide range of areas in information theory, including rate-distortion theory, network information theory, quantum information theory, and bio-information theory. He also left a deep imprint on diverse fields in applied mathematics and theoretical engineering, such as Markov random fields, group testing, multiple access theory, and detection and estimation. Well known for his technical brilliance, he tackled many challenging problems, but above all, it is his pursuit of elegance in research and writing that shines throughout his work. The goal of this special issue is to celebrate Toby Berger’s lasting legacy and his impact on information theory and beyond. Original research papers on topics within the realm of his scientific investigations and their “offspring”, as well as expository articles that survey his pioneering contributions and their modern developments, are invited.

Submission deadline extended to December 15, 2023 (originally November 15, 2023)

Over the past decade, machine learning (ML), that is the process of enabling computing systems to take data and churn out decisions, has been enabling tremendously exciting technologies. Such technologies can assist humans in making a variety of decisions by processing complex data to identify patterns, detect anomalies, and make inferences. At the same time, these automated decision-making systems raise questions about security and privacy of user data that drive ML, fairness of the decisions, and reliability of automated systems to make complex decisions that can affect humans in significant ways. In short, how can ML models be deployed in a responsible and trustworthy manner that ensures fair and reliable decision-making? This requires ensuring that the entire ML pipeline assures security, reliability, robustness, fairness, and privacy. Information theory can shed light on each of these challenges by providing a rigorous framework to not only quantify these desirata but also rigorously evaluate and provide assurances. From its beginnings, information theory has been devoted to a theoretical understanding of the limits of engineered systems. As such, it is a vital tool in guiding machine learning advances.

We invite previously unpublished papers that contribute to the fundamentals, as well as the applications of information- and learning-theoretic methods for secure, robust, reliable, fair, private, and trustworthy machine learning. Exploration of such techniques to practical systems is also relevant.

Deadline: (October 2, 2023) further extended to October 29th, 2023.

To support the fast growth of IoT and cyber physical systems, as well as the advent of 6G, there is a need for communication and networking models that enable more efficient modes for machine-type communications. This calls for a departure from the assumptions of classical communication theoretic problem formulations as well as the traditional network layers. This new communication paradigm is referred to as goal or task oriented communication, or in a broader sense, is part of the emerging area of semantic communications.

Over the past decade, there have been a number of approaches towards novel performance metrics, starting from measures of timeliness such as the Age of Information (AoI), Query Age of Information (QAoI), to those that capture goal oriented nature, tracking or control performance such as Quality of Information (QoI), Value of Information (VoI) and Age of Incorrect Information (AoII), moving toward to more sophisticated end-to-end distortion metrics (e.g. MSE), ML performance, or human perception of the reproduced data, and the application of finite-blocklength information theory in the context of the remote monitoring of stochastic processes, and real-time control.

We invite original papers that contribute to the fundamentals, as well as the applications of semantic metrics, and protocols that use them, in IoT or automation scenarios.

Deadline: (March 2, 2023) extended to March 17, 2023.

This special issue of the �������� Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory is dedicated to the memory of Alexander Vardy, a pioneer in the theory and practice of channel coding. His ground-breaking contributions ranged from unexpected solutions of longstanding theoretical conjectures to ingenious decoding algorithms that broke seemingly insurmountable barriers to code performance. Inspired not just by the mathematical beauty of coding theory but also by its engineering utility, Alexander Vardy developed novel coding techniques that have had a profound impact on modern information technology, including computer memories, data storage systems, satellite communications, and wireless cellular networks. At the same time, his innovations left their imprint on other scientific disciplines, such as information theory, computer science, and discrete mathematics.

Deadline: (January 15, 2023) extended to January 29, 2023.

Causal determinism, is deeply ingrained with our ability to understand the physical sciences and their explanatory ambitions. Besides understanding phenomena, identifying causal networks is important for effective policy design in nearly any avenue of interest, be it epidemiology, financial regulation, management of climate, etc. In recent years, many approaches to causal discovery have been proposed predominantly for two settings: a) for independent and identically distributed data and b) time series data. Furthermore, causality- inspired machine learning which harnesses ideas from causality to improve areas such as transfer learning, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, etc is attracting more and more interest in the research community. Yet fundamental problems in causal discovery such as how to deal with latent confounders, improve sample and computational complexity, and robustness remain open for the most part. This special issue aims at reporting progress in fundamental theoretical and algorithmic limits of causal discovery, impact of causal discovery on other machine learning tasks, and its applications in sciences and engineering.

Deadline: December 20, 2022. Extended to January 10, 2023