LIDS Welcomes Visiting Scholar Abbas El Gamal Fall 2018

September 6, 2018

It is our great pleasure to welcome Visiting Scholar Abbas El Gamal to LIDS for the fall semester. Professor El Gamal is the Hitachi America Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and is a highly-distinguished figure in the field. A member of the National Academy of Engineering and Fellow of the IEEE, he has received many prestigious honors for his work, including the 2016 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, the 2014 Viterbi Lecture, the 2013 Shannon Memorial Lecture, the 2012 Claude E. Shannon Award, the inaugural Padovani Lecture, and the 2004 INFOCOM Paper Award. He has a rich history of leadership, as well, serving over the course of his tenure at Stanford as Director of the Information Systems Laboratory and Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering.

Over the course of his career, Professor El Gamal’s research contributions have spanned several areas, including network information theory, Field Programmable Gate Arrays, and digital imaging devices and systems. He has authored or coauthored over 230 papers and holds over 30 patents in these areas. He has also coauthored the textbook Network Information Theory (Cambridge Press 2011).

While at LIDS for the semester, Professor El Gamal, whose visit is co-sponsored by MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has co-organized with Professor Devavrat Shah the Topics in Information and Inference seminar. This seminar covers topics at the nexus of information theory, inference, causality, estimation, and non-convex optimization, and will feature a two-part lecture, "Randomness and Information," presented by Professor El Gamal in late October and early November. To round out this two-part lecture, Professor El Gamal will give a third talk on recent results on the topic in mid-November, as part of the LIDS Seminar Series, which will conclude the sequence.