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Statistical Laboratory

Professor Ioannis Kontoyiannis

Professor Kontoyiannis works in information theory, applied probability, and statistics, including their applications in neuroscience, bioinformatics, and the development of machine learning algorithms. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the European Union, Greek national funds, the European Research Council, and numerous other national and international bodies. He has also been involved in consulting work for companies in the financial, medical, and high-tech industries.

He has been with DPMMS since June 2020 as Churchill Professor of Mathematics of Information.

Kontoyiannis was born in Athens, Greece, in 1972. He received the B.Sc. degree in mathematics in 1992 from Imperial College (U of London), and in 1993 he obtained a distinction in Part III of the Cambridge University Pure Mathematics Tripos. In 1997 he received the M.S. degree in statistics, and in 1998 the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering, both from Stanford University. In 1995 he worked at IBM Research, on a NASA-IBM satellite image processing and compression project.  From 1998 to 2001 he was with the Department of Statistics at Purdue University (and also, by courtesy, with the Department of Mathematics, and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering). Between 2000 and 2005 he was with the Division of Applied Mathematics and with the Department of Computer Science at Brown University. Between 2005 and 2021 he was with the Department of Informatics of the Athens University of Economics and Business.

Between 2018 and 2020 he was Professor of Information and Communications with the Information Engineering Division of the Engineering Department at Cambridge, where he was also Head of the Signal Processing and Communications Laboratory, and where he remains as an affiliated member.

In 2002 he was awarded the Manning Endowed Assistant Professorship by Brown University; in 2004 he was awarded a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship; in 2005 he was awarded an Honorary Master of Arts Degree Ad Eundem by Brown University; in 2009 he was awarded a two-year Marie Curie Fellowship; in 2011 he was elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow; in 2022 he was elected a Fellow of the AAIA; and in 2023 he was named a Fellow of the IMS.

Research Fellow, Institute of Applied & Computational Mathematics, Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas, Greece

Fellow, Darwin College, Cambridge

Associate Member, Signal Processing and Communications Group, Division of Information Engineering, Department of Engineering, Cambridge

Publications

Identifying Statistical Dependence in Genomic Sequences via Mutual Information Estimates
HM Aktulga, I Kontoyiannis, LA Lyznik, L Szpankowski, AY Grama, W Szpankowski
– EURASIP Journal on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology
(2007)
2007,
1
(doi: 10.1155/2007/14741)
Thinning and the law of small numbers
P Harremoës, O Johnson, I Kontoyiannis
– IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory - Proceedings
(2007)
1491
(doi: 10.1109/isit.2007.4557433)
Fisher information, compound Poisson approximation, and the Poisson channel
M Madiman, O Johnson, I Kontoyiannis
– 2007 IEEE INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON INFORMATION THEORY PROCEEDINGS, VOLS 1-7
(2007)
976
(doi: 10.1109/ISIT.2007.4557115)
Statistical dependence in biological sequences
HM Aktulga, I Kontoyiannis, LA Lyznik, L Szpankowski, AY Grama, W Szpankowski
– 2007 IEEE INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON INFORMATION THEORY PROCEEDINGS, VOLS 1-7
(2007)
2676
(doi: 10.1109/ISIT.2007.4557183)
Exponential bounds and stopping rules for MCMC and general Markov chains
I Kontoyiannis, LA Lastras-Montão, SP Meyn
– ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
(2006)
180,
45
(doi: 10.1145/1190095.1190152)
On estimating the rate-distortion function
M Harrison, I Kontoyiannis
– 2006 IEEE INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON INFORMATION THEORY, VOLS 1-6, PROCEEDINGS
(2006)
267
(doi: 10.1109/isit.2006.261847)
Entropy estimation: Simulation, theory and a case study
I Kontoyiannis
– 2006 IEEE Information Theory Workshop, ITW 2006
(2006)
257
Mismatched codebooks and the role of entropy coding in lossy data compression
I Kontoyiannis, R Zamir
– IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
(2006)
52,
1922
(doi: 10.1109/TIT.2006.872845)
From the Entropy to the Statistical Structure of Spike Trains
G Yun, I Kontoyiannis, E Bienenstock
– 2006 IEEE INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON INFORMATION THEORY, VOLS 1-6, PROCEEDINGS
(2006)
645
(doi: 10.1109/ISIT.2006.261864)
Measure Concentration for Compound Poisson Distributions
I Kontoyiannis, M Madiman
– Electronic Communications in Probability
(2006)
11,
45
(doi: 10.1214/ECP.v11-1190)
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Frontpage talks

Cambridge Statistics Clinic
MR14 at the CMS
Cambridge Statistics Clinic
MR15 at the CMS
Cambridge Statistics Clinic
MR5 at the CMS
Statistics
Stefan Wager (Stanford University)
13
Mar
16:00 - 17:00: Title to be confirmed
Peter Whittle Lecture
Rina Roygel Barber (Chicago)

Research Group

Statistical Laboratory

Email

yiannis@maths.cam.ac.uk

Room

D1.09

Telephone

01223 337961

Personal homepage

https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~ik355/

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