Students are expected to do a research project on a topic related to Information Theory. The project can be done either solo or in a team of two. Basically there are three options:
Pick a topic, irrespective of whether covered in the course, and do original research.
Pick a topic not covered in the course, and do an in-depth study. Use either a book or a definitive paper. I have listed several suggestions below.
Pick a topic not covered in the course, and do a literature survey using at-least 3 papers. Your report should not only present a summary, but also present a critical survey, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of the papers as well as providing your own thoughts.
Important dates
February 17: Submission of one paragraph summary
March 17: Mid-term report (a 4-5 pages long draft, but quality matters more than quantity)
April 17: Final report (about 10 pages long in IEEE conference article format)
Topics
Information theory and physics/biology/economics, Rateless codes, LDPC codes, MIMO channel capacity, Network coding, Network information theory, Quantum information theory.
Books
Chaitin, G. J. Information, randomness & incompleteness: papers on algorithmic information theory. Vol. 8. World Scientific, 1990.
Michael Nielsen and Isaac Chuang. Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, CUP, 2000
Mark Wilde. Quantum Information Theory, CUP, 2013
Abbas El-Gamal, Young-Han Kim. Network Information Theory, CUP, 2011
Hubert Yockey. Information Theory, Evolution, and The Origin of Life, CUP, 2011
John Avery. Information Theory And Evolution, World Scientific Publishing Company, 2012
Papers
Jaynes, E. T. "Information Theory and Statistical Mechanics," Phys. Rev., vol. 106, no. 4, (1957), 620--630
Roman-Roldan, Ramon, Pedro Bernaola-Galvan, and Jose Oliver. "Application of information theory to DNA sequence analysis: a review," Pattern recognition vol.29, no.7 (1996), 1187-1194.
Steane, Andrew. "Error correcting codes in quantum theory," Physical Review Letters vol.77, no.5 (1996), 793.
Steane, Andrew. "Quantum computing," Reports on Progress in Physics vol.61, no.2 (1998): 117.
Borst, Alexander and Frederic E. Theunissen. "Information theory and neural coding," Nature neuroscience vol.2, no.11 (1999), 947-957.
Ahlswede, Rudolf, et al. "Network information flow," Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on vol.46, no.4 (2000), 1204-1216.
Sharif, Masoud and Babak Hassibi. "On the capacity of MIMO broadcast channels with partial side information," Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on vol.51, no2 (2005), 506-522.
Avestimehr, A., Diggavi, S., and Tse, D. "Wireless network information flow: A deterministic approach," Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on, vol.57, no.4, (2011), 1872-1905.
Lashgari, S., Avestimehr, A., "Timely Throughput of Heterogeneous Wireless Networks: Fundamental Limits and Algorithms," Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on, vol.59, no.12 (2013), 8414-8433