Monday, July 20, 2009

Hot topics in info theory

I'm trying to figure out what's hot and what's not in information theory. So, for a laugh, I put together all the session titles from ISITs 2005-2009, and searched them for keywords.

In the following, I'm giving counts of the number of times a keyword appears in the list of sessions. The numbers of sessions at each conference were slightly different (from a low of 126 in 2005 to a high of 152 in 2006), but I don't bother to normalize since the range is small. Some findings:

MIMO is out, wireless is in:

Number of sessions with the given keyword:

Year | 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
----------------|----------------------------------
MIMO | 5 14 7 6 0
wireless | 3 5 5 4 14


Relay is on the downswing, cooperation is picking up the slack:

Number of sessions with the given keyword:

Year | 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
----------------|----------------------------------
relay | 4 2 9 8 5
cooperation* | 1 3 3 4 4

* includes "cooperative"

Turbo vs. LDPC -- LDPC is resurgent:

Number of sessions with the given keyword:

Year | 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
----------------|----------------------------------
turbo | 3 0 1 1 1
LDPC | 11 16 6 6 11


Source vs. channel -- sources are on the decline:

Number of sessions with the given keyword:

Year | 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
----------------|----------------------------------
source | 6 15 11 9 6
entropy | 1 3 1 1 0
|
channel | 12 19 25 16 22
capacity | 7 7 13 11 9



I've posted the session lists here if you want to do your own grepping: 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Isn't space-time coding MIMO?

Hence your count for 2009 is a little bit off as there are multiple sessions on space-time coding?

Andrew Eckford said...

True. But if you search the lists for "space-time" or "space time", you will get 5 hits in each of 2005-2008, and 4 hits in 2009, which kind of reinforces my point.