These are articles written by CSoI staff or suggested by CSoI faculty because they highlight the Science of Information in some way.

Meet the Authors of a Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

"The spirit of Claude Shannon looms large over IEEE Spectrum, and indeed the entire modern world. His 1937 demonstration that Boolean logic and algebra could be implemented ...

How to Grow Researchers: A Fresh Perspective on Graduate Student Collaboration

Luke Redington writes a short article on Center for Science of Information Education Director Brent Ladd and his understanding of graduate students and how he creates opportunities and environments to help them do ...

CSoI Participants Explore Boundaries of EEG Imaging

In the phys.org article "Innovation in brain imaging", CSoI participants Pulkit Grover and Praveen Venkatesh are highlighted for their work "

Purdue Profiles: David Gleich

Excerpt: Somehow, David Gleich makes the world of algebra, algorithms and data sound like a lot of fun. A complete blast. That's completely because while he's doing work that would fog the minds of ...

Model sheds light on purpose of inhibitory neurons

Excerpt: Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a new computational model of a neural circuit in the brain, which could shed light on the biological ro...

Stanford Researchers Send Messages Using Household Chemicals

"Researchers have built a machine that sends messages using common chemicals. Among many potential applications, this system could relay secret messages or allow tiny devices to communicate inside the human body."

Relatively Simple Quantum Computers Could Be Much More Powerful Than Previously Realized

"Quantum computers promise huge speedups on some computational problems because they harness a strange physical property called entanglement, in which the physical state of one tiny particle depends on measurements...

MRI research: Listen to more podcasts—they're good for your brain

"Listening to podcasts can do more than provide you with entertainment or information, according to a new study that says listening to them can stimulate activity across the brain."

Peer-to-Peer Mentoring: How It Fits into the Statistics Living Learning Community at Purdue

People of ACM - P.R. Kumar

An interview with CSoI founding member, University Distinguished Professor and College of Engineering Chair in Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University.

How DNA could store all the world’s data

"Modern archiving technology cannot keep up with the growing tsunami of bits. But nature may hold an answer to that problem already."

Magic is in the Airwaves: An Interview with Andrea Goldsmith

If anyone has a crystal ball in which to see the future of wireless communications, it is Professor Andrea Goldsmith. In this interview, she mapped a future in which magic will happen everyday. Highways will monito...

Shor's Algorithm is Implemented Using Five Trapped Ions

"A quantum computer made of five trapped ions has been used by physicists in Austria and the US to implement Shor's factoring algorithm. While the system performed the trivial task of factoring the number 15, the r...

When Cryptographers Disagree

"Six of the world’s leading cryptography experts sat down this week to explore the most pressing issues in security. They took up topics ranging from whether Apple should facilitate the FBI’s access to a known ...

Science of Information Summer School

White paper on the history and results of the Center's summer school.

The Sequence of Things to Come: An Interview with Wojciech Szpankowski about the Future of Information Science

Computers baffle me. For questions large and small—from how to rid my screen of yet another pop-up ad to whether the advent of Heartbleed means I might as well tweet all my financial data—I must ask others. Whe...

Postdoc Spotlight: Rui Ma

[Rui; pronounced “Ray”]: My name is Rui Ma, I graduated from University of Illinois with a PhD in Neuroscience. My field was neurophysiology at the same time I got a master degree in applied mathematics. The ma...

Serving Women with a Purposeful Vision

For the March 2013 issue of IEEE Computer Special issue on Gender Diversity in Computing

Postdoc Spotlight: Sheila Rosenberg

We sat down with Sheila Rosenberg during a break in the student-postdoc research workshop that took place in July 2012. This is what she had to say about her interactions with the Center. My name is Shelia ...

Postdoc Spotlight: Pulkit Grover

We sat down with Pulkit Grover during a break in the student-postdoc research workshop that took place in July 2012. Pulkit was a post-doctoral scholar at Stanford during the time of this interview. He is now an As...

Postdoc Spotlight: Tom Courtade

So certainly, I guess, one of the challenges is bringing together these people from various backgrounds, who speak, you know, different languages almost, with different terminology and everything. but I think the c...

A to Z Challenge 2012: Q is for Quantum Theology and Renaissance Woman Michelle Francl-Donnay

Except from blog: "I met Michelle Francl-Donnay, writer of Quantum Theology,  in 2008, when she came to one of our craft shows.  She was my first “from blog to real life” encounter.  Michelle found S...

Brain imaging: fMRI 2.0

Functional magnetic resonance imaging is growing from showy adolescence into a workhorse of brain imaging.

Beyond Shannon...Legacy

Information permeates everything: from electrochemical information exchanged in networks of neurons, to biological information stored, and processed in living cells, to business information, etc.

Can Wi-Fi and Mi-Fi get along?

"Proliferation of the mobile Wi-Fi gadgets spotted in Austin in public and in the workplace comprise a trend called “BYOD” — Bring Your Own Device. The term has special significance for conferences like SXSW....

USC Viterbi Lecture Celebrates Information Theory

In 1948, an American researcher almost singlehandedly laid the foundation for computers, cell phones, compact discs, the Internet, interplanetary communications and most other aspects of what we call the Informatio...

In UC Berkeley Lab, Mind-Reading is Real

The latest episode of  “Prime: Cuts” could easily be the premise of a Hollywood science fiction movie. Except this science is real, and it’s happening at UC Berkele...

Quantum computing: Is it possible, and should you care?

"What is a quantum computer and when can I have one? It makes use of all that "spooky" quantum stuff and vastly increases computing power, right? And they'll be under every desk when scientists finally tame the spo...

Controversial quantum computer beats factoring record

"Is this a record for a quantum computer? A group of physicists in China have used a process called adiabatic computing to find the prime factors of the number 143, beating the previous record for a quantum comput...

Beyond Shannon...legacy by Antonio Manzalini

Information permeates everything: from electrochemical information exchanged in networks of neurons, to biological information stored, and processed in living cells, to business information, etc. Our curren...

Student Spotlight: Dan Zhang

Give us your background as a person and a student and how you eventually came to work on your Ph.D….what sticks out in your mind as big influences or important events that got you to this point?

Student Spotlight: Oluwaseun Ademuwagun

Project: Predicting Marked Code-switching in African Languages Give us a little bit of your background as a person and a student and how you eventually came to work on your undergraduate in this f...

Quantitative Approach to Information Processing - U.S. News & World Report

"Center (CSoI) is defining core principles of multi-disciplinary information transfer"

Scott Aaronson: Quantum Computing Promises New Insights - NYTimes.com

"You may want to read an interesting article by Scott Aaronson in today's NYT." In fact, the whole science section of NYT is devoted to "The Future of Computing": http://www.nytimes.com...

Nobel Winners in Economics: The Reluctant Celebrities - NYtimes.com

"Here's a very interesting article from today's NY Times on Chris Sims and Thomas Sargent."

DNA Sequencing Caught in Deluge of Data - NYTimes.com

Sergio Verdú comments "We are going to have to come up with really clever ways to throw away data."

Student Spotlight: Arpita Sen

I joined Claudio Aguilar’s lab here at Purdue University. He has two different systems that he works on simultaneously: cell biology with yeast and cell biology with mammals. So basically, yeast is a very good sy...

Interdisciplinary Computing Blog: The Wireless Car Considered

The result of interviews with Deepak Kumar, "This is P. R. Kumar's work being presented in lay person term...

Computer Experts Building 1830s Babbage Analytical Engine - NYtimes.com

Professor Mark Daniel Ward comments \"This article is relevant to the history of the fundamentals of computing.\"

Reading the brain: Mind-googling

"It is now possible to scan someone's brain and get a reasonable idea of what is going on through his mind." Wojciech Szpankowski recommended ...

Student Spotlight: Marianne Catanho

"Bridging Electrical Engineering and Neuroscience" Here in my lab at the University of Illinois, in cooperation with Todd Coleman and Rhanor Gilette, who are my advisors, we look into bridging neuroscienc...

Biology 2.0

"A decade after the human-genome project, writes Geoffrey Carr (interviewed here), biological science is poised on the edge of something wonderful" Dr. Gill Bejerano shared an article that he says may ...

Book Review: The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood

  Shared here with permission by the author.  

There's a GAP in the ENTH domain

A commentary by Brigitte Ritter and Peter S. McPherson. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), March 14, 2006, vol. 103, no. 11.  �...

Can Mobile Phone Networks Be Improved to Better Cope with Emergencies?

Andrea Goldsmith was interviewed for this article in Scientific American "about why all the cell phones stopped working when the earthquake hit NYC."

Grand Challenge for the Long Term

A modern study of information must take into account the fact that information is distributed among many agents at different locations. Agents can communicate among themselves, subject to a variety of different possib...

Fifty Years of Shannon Theory, by Sergio Verdu

Seeing the Natural World With a Physicist's Lens

"the basic building blocks of human eyesight turn out to be practically perfect. Scientists have learned that the fundamental units of vision, the photoreceptor cells that carpet the retinal tissue of the eye and r...

What Is I.B.M.'s Watson?

"For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocuti...

The Data Deluge: Businesses, governments and society are only starting to tap its vast potential, from "The Economist"

Growing up digital - Wired for distraction - from "The New York Times"

A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans

part of the “Smarter than you think series” published in the New York Times.

Keynote by Robert Gallager at the IEEE Information Theory Society 2009 School of IT

An Exploratory Data Analysis Method to Reveal Modular Latent Structures in High-Throughput Data

by Tianwei Yu Background: Modular structures are ubiquitous across various types of biological networks. The study of network modularity can help reveal regulatory mechanisms in syste...

Community Structure in Time-Dependent, Multiscale, and Multiplex Networks

Peter J. Mucha, Thomas Richardson, Kevin Macon, Mason A. Porter and Jukka-Pekka Onnela Abstract: Network science is an interdisciplinary endeavor, with methods and applications drawn fr...

Rough Set Soft Computing Cancer Classification and Network: One Stone, Two Birds

by Yue Zhang Gene expression profiling provides tremendous information to help unravel the complexity of cancer. The selection of the most informative genes from huge noise for cancer classification ha...

Comparison of Statistical and Optimization-based Methods for Data-Driven Network Reconstruction of Biochemical Systems

Data-driven reconstruction of biological networks is a crucial step towards making sense of large volumes of biological data. While several methods have been developed recently for reconstruction of the networks, n...

An Efficient Nonlinear Programming Strategy for PCA Models with Incomplete Data Sets

Processing plants can produce large amounts of data that process engineers use for analysis, monitoring, or control. Principal component analysis (PCA) is well suited to analyze large amounts of (possibly) correlat...

A Scaling Normalization Method for Differential Expression Analysis of RNA-seq Data

The fine detail by sequencing-based transcriptome surveys suggests that RNA-seq is likely to become the platform of choice for interrogating steady state RNA. In order to discover biologically important changes in exp...

Intersection of Information Theory with Other Disciplines

Ideas discussed during meeting held on Sept 28, 2010 at UIUC (Allerton Workshop) Contributed by Wojciech Szpankowski.