3 Concepts: Information, Course at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki

This course is the first course in the "Three concepts" series, and provides an introduction to information and coding theory for computer science students. In fact much of the course can be viewed as applications of Shannon's central result known as the source coding theorem. The theoretical results will be illustrated by various descriptions of practical data compression systems from Huffman coding to Rissanen's arithmetic coding. In order to demonstrate the wide applicability of information-theoretic concepts, the role of Bayesian inference in data compression is discussed, and we end the course by describing application of information-theoretic principles to (statistical) modeling, i.e., the Minimum Description Length Principle (MDL).

Instructor: Professor Henry Tirri, Complex Systems Computation Group
Course assistant: M.Sc. Teemu Roos

In addition to regular lectures the course involves project work and poster presentations. These pages will be updated during the course and the current schedule and topics are only tentative.

Course description Registration Projects Posters Term paper Material Results (Intranet)		Course Schedule: Thu 7.3 Lecture: ''What is Information Theory?'' Thu 14.3 Lecture: ''How much can we compress? - Shannon's Source Coding Theorem'' Thu 21.3 Lecture: ''Revenge of a student: Symbol codes'' Thu 11.4 ''The great Lempel-Ziv vs. Arithmetic coding debate'' Thu 25.4 Lecture: ''On Minimum Description Length Modeling'' Thu 2.5 Lecture: ''Year 2020 - Topics in Information Theory for Further Studies'' Tue 14.5 Seminar at Unitas Congress Center. (Participation obligatory.)   See the Seminar program.

3 Concepts: Information	Last updated June 18, 2002