Vontobel, Pascal Olivier

Biography

Pascal O. Vontobel received the Diploma degree in electrical engineering in 1997, the Post-Diploma degree in information techniques in 2002, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 2003, all from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. From 1997 to 2002 he was a research and teaching assistant at the Signal and Information Processing Laboratory at ETH Zurich, from 2006 to 2013 he was a research scientist with the Information Theory Research Group at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA, USA, and since 2014 he has been an Associate Professor at the Department of Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Besides this, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2002-2004), a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2004-2005), a postdoctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006), and a visiting scholar at Stanford University (2014). His research interests lie in information theory, data science, communications, and signal processing. Dr. Vontobel has been an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2009-2012), an Awards Committee Member of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2013-2014), a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2014-2015), and a TPC co-chair of the 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory. Currently, he is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications and a TPC co-chair of the upcoming 2018 IEEE Information Theory Workshop in Guangzhou, China. He has been on the technical program committees of many international conferences and has co-organized several topical workshops. Moreover, he has been three times a plenary speaker at international information and coding theory conferences and has been awarded the ETH medal for his Ph.D. dissertation.

Research Interest

» Information theory » Error-control coding > Iterative decoding of graph-based codes > Algebraic coding theory > Constrained coding » Graphical models » Quantum information processing » Data science » Compressed sensing » Optimization theory