Igor Devetak: Following in Claude Shannon's footsteps

Assistant professor of Electrical Engineering/Systems Igor Devetak has won a highly competitive National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Award, the fourth such awarded this year to Viterbi School junior faculty.

The five-year $400,000 award will further Devetak’s work in expanding classic information theory, as systematized by Claude Shannon, to include quantum information systems.

The official title is “A High-Level Framework for a Unified Treatment of Quantum and Classical Information Theory and Thermodynamics." Devetak hopes that it will clarify fundamentals and help accelerate the creation of quantum cryptography systems  (which notify senders if their message has been seen by anyone other than the designated recipient), and, eventually, quantum computers.

“The goal of this work,” explains EE/Systems chairman Alexander Sawchuk, “is to develop a modular mathematical formalism for quantum and classical information theory, in which coding theorems are phrased as inequalities between information processing resources such as entanglement and quantum communication.”

It expands on a groundbreaking paper Devetak published in 2003, which set forth a novel, rigorous proof for determining information capacity of quantum information channels, as Shannon had classically done for now-standard digital electronic channels.

Devetak is a native of Belgrade, Serbia who studied mathematics at Cambridge University, England, He began his Ph.D. studies at Cornell University studying physics, but changed to Electrical Engineering with 2006 Andrew J. Viterbi Distinguished Lecturer Toby Berger (now at the University of Virginia) as his thesis advisor.

After winning his PhD in 2002, he went to the TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown NY, where he studied as a post-doc with quantum information theory pioneer Charles Bennett.

He was recruited to USC and joined the Communications Science Institute, and “I really like being in Los Angeles,” he says.

The NSF CAREER program recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. CAREER awardees are selected on the basis of creative, career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution.