CS6800 11F: Presentation Topics

Created: Tue 06 Sep 2011
Last modified:


This list is not meant to be exclusive or exhaustive. If there are papers in a field of your interest that use Information Theory and that you would interested in presenting, I would strongly encourage you to present those papers. Think of the list below as just a starting point.

  1. Gambling/Investments

    One can characterize the optimal method for gambling via Information Theory, and extensions of this work can be applied to "optimal portfolios" in the stock market.

    Possible presentation topics can be found in

  2. Kolmogorov Complexity

    Kolmogorov Complexity is a fascinating topic, worthy of a course in and of itself. (I may teach such a course some day.) Kolmogorov Complexity measure the complexity of a "string" not by the entropy of the source that produced it but rather by the size of the smallest program which could reproduce it. Kolmogorov Complexity has many applications, and there are deep connections to Information Theory.

    Possible presentation topics can be found in

  3. Signal Processing, Computer Vision, etc.

    Information Theory has been widely applied to these areas. Below are but a few classic papers.

  4. Biology

    Information Theory has often been applied to biological problems; entire conferences have been devoted to these approaches. Here are a few pointers:

  5. Similarity Measures and Computational Linguistics

    Similarity measures are often needed to solve problems in Computational Linguistics, and Information Theory has been widely applied to both topics.

  6. Machine Learning

    Information Theory is at the heart of nearly all algorithms for learning Decision Trees, one of the most used and useful machine learning methods. Information Theory has also been used to prove lower bounds on the number of samples necessary to learn in the presence of noise.

  7. Network Information Flow and Network Coding

    A flurry of recent papers has appplied Information Theory and coding to study the problem of information flow in computer networks.