The ITW 2026 plenary speakers are (in alphabetical order):
- Andrew Cross, IBM Research
- Meir Feder, Tel-Aviv University, Israel
- Anna Gilbert, Yale University, USA
- Daniela Tuninetti, UIC, USA
Andrew Cross (IBM Research)
Bio: Andrew Cross is a research scientist at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center. His interests include quantum error-correction and fault-tolerant architectures for quantum computers, validation and control of superconducting qubits, and synthesis, optimization, and simulation of quantum circuits. He received S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University.
Meir Feder (Tel-Aviv University, Israel)
Bio: Meir Feder received the B.Sc and M.Sc degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1980 and 1984 from Tel-Aviv University and the Sc.D degree in Electrical Engineering and Ocean Engineering in 1987 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). After being a Research Associate and a Lecturer in MIT, he joined the School of Electrical Engineering, Tel-Aviv University, where he is now a Chaired Professor and the head of the newly established Tel-Aviv university center for Artificial intelligence and Data science (TAD). He is also a Visiting Professor with the Department of EECS, MIT.
Parallel to his academic career, he is closely involved with the high-tech industry. He founded 5 companies, among them are Peach Networks that developed an interactive TV solution (Acq: MSFT) and Amimon that provided the highest quality, robust and no delay wireless high-definition A/V connectivity (Acq:LON.VTC). Recently, with his renewed interest in machine learning and AI, he cofounded Run:ai, a virtualization, orchestration, and acceleration platform for AI infrastructure. He is also an active angel investor and serves on the board/advisory board of several US and Israeli companies.
Prof. Feder received several academic and professional awards including the IEEE Information Theory Society best paper award for his work on universal prediction, the “creative thinking” award of the Israeli Defense Forces, and the Research Prize of the Israeli Electronic Industry, awarded by the President of Israel. For the development of Amimon’s chip-set, that uses a unique MIMO implementation of joint source-channel coding for wireless video transmission he received the 2020 Scientific and Engineering Award of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Anna Gilbert (Yale University, USA)
Bio: Anna Gilbert received an S.B. degree from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from Princeton University, both in Mathematics. In 1997, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University and AT&T Labs-Research. From 1998 to 2004, she was a member of technical staff at AT&T Labs-Research in Florham Park, NJ. From 2004 to 2020, she was with the Department of Mathematics (with a secondary appointment in Electrical and Computer Engineering) at the University of Michigan, where she was eventually the Herman H. Goldstine Collegiate Professor. In 2020, she moved to Yale University as the John C. Malone Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Statistics & Data Science. As of 2023, she is the John C. Malone Professor of Statistics & Data Science.
She has received many awards, including a Sloan Research Fellowship (2006), an NSF CAREER award (2006), the National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiatives in Research (2008), the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Douglas Engelbart Best Paper award (2008), the EURASIP Signal Processing Best Paper award (2010), a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow (2012), and the SIAM Ralph E. Kleinman Prize (2013).
Her research interests include analysis, probability, and algorithms. She is especially interested in algorithms with applications to harmonic analysis, signal and image processing, and machine learning.
Daniela Tuninetti (UIC, USA)
Bio: Daniela Tuninetti received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from ENST/Télécom ParisTech, Paris, France, in 2002, with research conducted at the Eurecom Institute in Sophia Antipolis, France. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Swiss Federal institute of Technologies in Lausanne (EPFL) Switzerland from 2022 to 2024. She joined the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) in 2005, where she is currently Professor and Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Her research focuses on the fundamental performance limits of wireless interference networks; integrated communication and radar sensing; reconfigurable intelligent surface-aided networks, including near-field regimes; impact of hardware impairments on system performance; and private and secure cache-aided distributed coded computing.
She received the Best Paper Award at the European Wireless Conference (2002), the NSF CAREER Award (2007), and was named a University of Illinois Scholar (2015). She served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter (2006–2008); Associate Editor for IEEE Communications Letters (2006–2009), IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (2011–2014), IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2014–2017), and IEEE Transactions on Communications (2021–2022).
She was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2020–2022). She is a Fellow of IEEE.