Holger Boche, along with

• Albert Guillen i Fabregas (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona),
• Alfonso Martinez (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona),
• Mark M. Wilde (Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge),
• Andreas Winter (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona)

is organizing the 4th Beyond IID in Information Theory workshop, which will take place on July 18-22, 2016 in Barcelona, Spain.

Quantum Shannon theory is arguably the core of the new “physics of information,” which has revolutionised our understanding of information processing by demonstrating new possibilities that cannot occur in a classical theory of information. It is also a very elegant generalisation, indeed extension, of Shannon's theory of classical communication. The origins of quantum Shannon theory lie in the 1960s, with a slow development until the 1990s when the subject exploded; the last 10-15 years have seen a plethora of new results and methods. Two of the most striking recent discoveries are that entanglement between inputs to successive channel uses can enhance the capacity of a quantum channel for transmitting classical data, and that it is possible for two quantum communication channels to have a non-zero capacity for transmitting quantum data, even if each channel on its own has no such quantum capacity.

In recent years, both in classical and quantum Shannon theory, attention has shifted from the strictly asymptotic point of view towards questions of finite block length. For this reason, and fundamentally, there is a strong drive to establish the basic protocols and performance limits in the one-shot setting. This one-shot information theory requires the development of new tools, in particular non-standard entropies and relative entropies (min-, Rényi-, hypothesis testing), both in the classical and quantum setting. These tools have found numerous applications, ranging from cryptography to strong converses, to second and third order asymptotics of various source and channel coding problems. A particularly exciting set of applications links back to physics, with the development of a resource theory of thermodynamic work extraction and more generally of state transformations. Physicists have furthermore found other resource theories, for instance that of coherence and that of asymmetry, which are both relevant to the thermodynamics of quantum systems and interesting in their own right.

More information can be found on the website of the event.