Stefano Rini

I was born on the beautiful Como Lake in the north of Italy at some point in the not-so-distant future. My academic performance had been far from notice until I started my bachelor studies  in 2002 in Computer Science at the Como campus of the Politecnico of Milano. I graduated in 2005 with a thesis on the vibrational dumping of hypersonic vacuum pumps and left the university with the firm conviction of not doing any programming ever again in my life. Thanks to my good academic performance during my bachelor studies, I was able to earn a three year fellowship from the Rotary Club Milano Sempione which gave me the opportunity to pursue my doctoral studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). At UIC, I studied under the supervision of Professor Daniela Tuninetti and, later on, under that of Professor Natasha Devroye. As my thesis was fairly theoretical, I kept taking math & stat classes, so that by the time I completed my doctoral studies, I had accrued enough courses for a master in Statistic, as well as for a master in Electrical and Computer Engineering. 

I graduated in 2010 with the thesis “Cognition and cooperation in wireless network: an information theoretic perspective” which mostly dealt with a multi-terminal information theoretical model, the cognitive interference channel, which captures the effect of unidirectional cooperation among nodes in a communication network.
After my doctoral studies I joined Stanford under the supervision of Professor Andrea Goldsmiths and and Technische Universität München (TUM) under the supervision of Professor Gerhard Kramer. During this period, I expanded my research horizon to coding theory and computational neuroscience.

After three years as a postdoctoral scholar, I decided to joint the the National Chao Tung University (NCTU) in Taiwan in 2014 as an assistant professor. As I joined NCTU, Professor Moser left his post here as the director of the information theory laboratory. Given the similarity in our research interests, it was a natural choice for me to take over the laboratory.

Since I joined NCTU, I have been focused on supporting NCTU’s internationalization efforts in establishing academic agreements through the Office of International Affair and recruiting international students for our ECE-CS international graduate program (IGP).

Also, I have promoted and organized summer school and conferences in Taiwan such as 2017 IEEE Information Theory Workshop in Kaohsiung, and the 2023  IEEE International Symphosium of Information Theory in Taipei and the 2018  East Asian School of Information Theory and Communication in Taipei.

In 2018 I was promoted to the position of associate professor.