The 2025 Croucher Summer Course in Information Theory (CSCIT 2025) was held at C.W. Chu College at The Chinese University of Hong Kong from August 3 to August 8, 2025.
There were 5 lecturers and 40 participants, with 15 participants from universities in Hong Kong, 15 participants from universities in Mainland China, and the other participants from Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, India, Turkey, and Canada.
The school consisted of five exciting tutorials:
- Prof. Aditya Gopalan (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India), “Multi-armed bandits and reinforcement learning”
- Prof. Si-Hyeon Lee (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, South Korea), “Privacy-preserving statistical inference and machine learning with differential privacy”
- Prof. Olgica Milenkovic (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA), “Molecular data storage: system implementations and coding approaches”
- Prof. Chandra Nair (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR), “Information inequalities over additive structures”
- Prof. Emanuele Viterbo (Monash University, Melbourne, Australia), “Delay-doppler communication and sensing for high-mobility environments”
Besides the tutorial lectures, there were four poster sessions where each participant presented a poster related to his/her own research or, in case of junior graduate students, a tutorial poster on some topic.
Apart from the technical program, there were two excursions: one excursion to Victoria Peak on Hong Kong Island that included group-building activities and a banquet dinner, and one excursion to Cheung Chau Island that included climbing, playing ball sports, and a dinner.
We sincerely thank all the lecturers and participants for the efforts in making this summer course a success. Moreover, the smooth operation and administration of this summer course would not have been possible without the dedicated help by Mr. Robert Rogers and his team, along with Ms. Yoyo Chan and Ms. Clara Yu from the Department of Information Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Finally, we are very grateful to the Croucher Foundation for generously sponsoring this summer course. (The Croucher Foundation is an academic charity that was founded by Noel Croucher. It funds educational programs for natural science, technology, and medicine in Hong Kong.)
This was the sixth installment of the Croucher Summer Course in Information Theory, with the other summer schools being held in 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2023 (all in Hong Kong). There are plans to have the next Croucher Summer Course in Information Theory in 2027.