SHORT BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

 

Ioannis Kontoyiannis was born in Athens, Greece, in 1972. He received the B.Sc. degree in mathematics in 1992 from Imperial College (University of London), and in 1993 he obtained a distinction in Part III of the Cambridge University Pure Mathematics Tripos. In 1997 he received the M.S. degree in statistics, and in 1998 the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering, both from Stanford University. In 1995 he worked at IBM Research, on a NASA-IBM satellite image processing and compression project.  From 1998 to 2001 he was with the Department of Statistics at Purdue University (and also, by courtesy, with the Department of Mathematics, and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering). Between 2000 and 2005 he was with the Division of Applied Mathematics and with the Department of Computer Science at Brown University. Between 2005 and 2021 he was with the Department of Informatics of the Athens University of Economics and Business. In 2009 he was a visiting professor with the Department of Statistics at Columbia University. Between 2018 and 2020 he was with the Department of Engineering of the University of Cambridge, where he held the Chair of Information and Communications, and he was Head of the Signal Processing and Communications Laboratory. In 2020 he joined the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge, where he is the Churchill Professor of Mathematics of Information. He is a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge, and an Associate Member of the Signal Processing and Communications Laboratory, at the Information Engineering Division within the Department of Engineering.

 

In 2002 he was awarded the Manning endowed assistant professorship; in 2004 he was awarded the Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship; in 2005 he was awarded an honorary Master of Arts Degree Ad Eundem by Brown University; in 2009 he was awarded a two-year Marie Curie Fellowship; in 2011 he was elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers); in 2022 he was elected a Fellow of the AAIA (Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association); in 2023 he was named an IMS Fellow (Institute of Mathematical Statistics). He has published over 50 journal articles in leading international journals and over 120 conference papers in the top international conferences in his field. He also holds two U.S. patents. He has been a plenary speaker in several conferences and has given invited lectures in many international meetings as well as in various departments in leading institutions around the world. He has served on the editorial board of the American Mathematical Society's Quarterly of Applied Mathematics journal, the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Springer-Verlag's Acta Applicandae Mathematicae, the book series Lecture Notes in Mathematics by Springer-Verlag, and the online journal Entropy. He has served as a chair or member of the program committee of numerous IEEE conferences, and he also served a short term as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.  

 

His research interests include information theory, applied probability, and statistics, along with their applications in neuroscience, bioinformatics, and the development of machine learning algorithms.