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Professor Li Cheuk-ting, Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), has been awarded the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Information Theory Society Paper Award 2023. This marks the third time that CUHK’s Department of Information Engineering has won this award, a record among Hong Kong institutions, with previous wins in 2005 by Professor Raymond Yeung for Network Coding and in 2016 by Professor Chandra Nair for developing a new technique for Gaussian optimality.

The awarded paper, “A Unified Framework for One-Shot Achievability via the Poisson Matching Lemma”, was co-authored by Professor Li and Professor Venkat Anantharam from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. The paper presents a result, called the Poisson matching lemma, that provides a new approach to constructing coding schemes for various delay-constrained communication scenarios, with sharp bounds on the error rate. The new approach proposed by Professor Li and Professor Anantharam can potentially be applied in a wide range of industries where reliable communication of short messages is required over noisy communication channels, for example the Internet of Things (IoT) and telecommunications.

Professor Li said, “The transmission of short messages within a small delay will be increasingly important due to the rising number of connected devices. I am honoured by the recognition this paper has received. I hope this work on a new approach to the theoretical analysis of finite-blocklength communication can provide insights into the design of practical communication schemes.”

Professor Li received his B.Sc. in mathematics and B.Eng. in information engineering from CUHK in 2012 and his M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2014 and 2018 respectively. He was a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley. He joined the Department of Information Engineering, CUHK, in January 2020 as an assistant professor. His research interests include developing new information-theoretical techniques to address problems in delay-constrained communications, automated theorem proving, distributed computing and machine learning. He was awarded the 2016 IEEE Jack Keil Wolf ISIT Student Paper Award.