June 3, 2020 Papailiopoulos, Lee win ComSoc/ITSoc outstanding paper award Written By: Jason Daley Departments: Electrical & Computer Engineering Categories: Awards Assistant professors Kangwook Lee and Dimitris Papailiopoulos in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UW-Madison are the winners of the 2020 Joint Communications Society/Information Theory Society Paper Award. The award recognizes outstanding papers that lie at the intersection of communications and information theory published in the societies’ publications in the previous three years. The winning paper, “Speeding up distributed machine learning using codes,” appeared in the March 2018, issue of IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. The paper discusses ways to use codes to speed up distributed learning algorithms to improve matrix multiplication and data shuffling which leads to significant gains in performance. Paper co-authors include Maximilian Lam and Kannan Ramchandran of the University of California at Berkeley and Ramtin Pedarsani of the University of California at Santa Barbara. The award will be presented at the virtual online International Symposium on Information Theory taking place June 21-26, 2020.