The International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) is the premier annual information theory conference worldwide, and thus a valuable forum for graduate students in this discipline to present their work, receive feedback from other researchers working on similar or related topics, and to make professional acquaintances within the discipline. This award provides international travel funds to be awarded to students who have a paper accepted at this year's ISIT and who otherwise would not have sufficient travel funds to attend the symposium. As information theory is a core component of the Communications and Information Foundations cluster, the efforts to ensure participation of graduate students in this symposium are consistent with NSF's goal of promoting education and research of the next generation of scientists.
The Information Theory Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) sponsors the International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) annually. The symposium promotes scientific advancement, understanding, and the dissemination of research results in the fields of interest of the Society. According to its constitution, the society focuses on the processing, transmission, storage, and use of information, and the foundations of the communication process. It specifically encompasses theoretical and certain applied aspects of coding, communications and communications networks, complexity and cryptography, detection and estimation, learning, Shannon Theory, and stochastic processes. As the premier conference in information theory, ISIT has always been the primary meeting venue of the leading researchers in the field. This is where researchers get an increased awareness of the relationships between theory and practice and of the impact of different kinds of work. It is also where the more application oriented workers gain a realization of the importance of the conceptual structure of the field. The information theory field provides an excellent example of conceptual research working in close synergy with system design and applications. The symposia are also becoming increasingly valued for the connections between information theory and related fields such as bioinformatics, security and machine learning. Students form an integral part of the Information Theory Society and therefore in the past few years the society has undertaken activities to specifically increase and promote student participation. These include establishment of the ISIT Student Paper Award, the North American School of Information Theory, ISIT Tutorials, and the Information Theory Society Student Committee. This project provided travel grants to 26 student information theorists from the United States whose papers have been accepted for presentation at the 2013 ISIT. In addition to the the student events organized by the Information Theory Society Student Committee, an outstanding benefit of the ISIT for the awarded students was the close personal interaction with senior and other junior workers in information theory, which encourages the liberal exchange of ideas and critical comments.
