A word from the General and Technical Program Co-chairs

Dear Participants of the ITW 2012 in Lausanne,

It is a pleasure to welcome you all to Lausanne on the occasion of the first Information Theory workshop held in Switzerland.

This year, we are aiming for a somewhat different presentation format than the previous workshops, with the hope of maximizing the interactionsand discussions: instead of traditional 20 minute talks, we opted for poster sessions as the main presentation form. Each such poster session is preceded by a ``spotlight'' session, consisting of 5-minute talks. These are meant to attract the audience to longer discussions around the posters.

In addition to these poster sessions, we are hosting distinguished speakers from areas such as CS crypto, machine learning and biology. We hope that dialog and collaboration between these areas and our community can be strengthened by the presentations and interactions with the speakers. Among our invited speakers is Dr. Katalin Marton. We are pleased without foresight in asking the next Shannon awardee, and grateful to Dr. Marton for accepting our invitation.

We would like to thank the members the technical program committee, the reviewers and the authors, for making the event possible.We would also like to thank Damir Laurenzi and Giovanni Cangiani for computer and web support, and most particularly Muriel Bardet, Françoise Behn and Yvonne Huskie for taking care of all the local organization in their usual impeccable fashion.

We wish all the participants a pleasant and productive time in Lausanne.

The Organizers