Distinguished Information Theory Scholar and Machine Learning Pioneer
Associated with :
The University of California, San DiegoDr. Alon Orlitsky serves as the Qualcomm Professor for Information Theory and its Applications at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds joint appointments in the Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science departments. After earning his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from Ben Gurion University in 1981 and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1986, he spent a decade at Bell Labs before joining UCSD in 1997. His groundbreaking research spans information theory, machine learning, probability estimation, and speech recognition, earning him numerous prestigious honors including the IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award (1992), IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award (2006), NeurIPS Best Paper Award (2015), and the Claude E. Shannon Award (2021). He is particularly recognized for founding the Information Theory and Applications Workshop in 2006, which has become a crucial bridge between information theory and emerging fields like machine learning. His leadership roles include serving as IEEE Information Theory Society President in 2016 and contributing to significant outreach projects including the "Bit Player" movie.