Talk at LSIT 2019

On May 30^th, I had the great pleasure to give a talk at the 5th London Symposium on Information Theory. The symposium is a revival of a conference series that was started in the 50s and 60s, with notable speakers such as Shannon and Turing. As back then, this year’s LSIT was jointly organized by Imperial College London (Deniz Gündüz) and King’s College London (Osvaldo Simeone). It was a great honor to be one of the invited speakers, and I was happy to talk about the potentials and pitfalls of training neural networks to minimize the information bottleneck functional (joint work with Ali Amjad from TUM). The paper accompanying this work is accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (but you can also find it on arXiv). If you are interested in the talk, as always you can download it by clicking on the image below.

Unfortunately, my stay at this symposium was the shorted I ever had (and, hopefully, will ever have): I got notice on the morning of my talk that my wife and my son fell sick, so I decided to fly back right after my talk to support them as best as I can. Apparently, the universe decided at the same time to make my trip back home as complicated as possible: The mobile website of Austrian Airlines claimed that my last name is invalid (whatever that means), a two-mile run to get my luggage from the hotel that made me all sweaty, and a fire alarm right in the middle of my talk overthrew the conference schedule. I still managed to hold my talk – it would not have been possible without the generous help of the organizers and the kind understanding of the entire audience.

#LSIT is back in session after a short break due to fire alarm 🚨 pic.twitter.com/SXSVvaOytr

— Deniz Gunduz (@DenizGunduz1) May 30, 2019

Leaving a conference right after the talk is rude; it does not give your colleagues the opportunity to discuss your own ideas offline over coffee (or beer). Even worse, it can be seen as an expression of the disinterest in the talks of your colleagues. In my case, leaving the conference so early made me sad in one more way: I had to leave a group of people – information theorists – that I consider my academic family (and many of which I consider even friends). Only my own family could make me do that – and I know that the attendees of the London Symposium understand. Thanks!