Interactive Information Theory

In a profoundly influential 1948 paper, Claude Shannon introduced information theory and used it to study one-way data transmission problems over different channels, both noisy and noiseless. That paper initiated the study of error correcting codes and data compression, two concepts that are especially relevant today with the rise of the internet and data-intensive applications.

In the last decades, interactive communication protocols are used and studied extensively, raising the fundamental question: To what extent can Shannon's results be generalized to the interactive setting, where parties engage in an interactive communication protocol? In this talk we will focus on the interactive analog of data compression in an attempt to answer the above question.