Gunank Singh Jakhar, a Ph.D student working with Gowtham Raghunath Kurri and co-supervised by Suryajith Chillara has been selected as a finalist for the Jack Keil Wolf award for his research work on Fractional Subadditivity of Submodular Functions: Equality Conditions and Their Applications at the International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2025 held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA from 22 to 27 June.

Gunank’s work investigates a fundamental property of sub-modular functions, a rich class of functions with extensive applications in information theory, computer science, and machine learning. The paper was described by the reviewers as highly non-trivial, with further implications both within and outside information theory. Notably, IIIT Hyderabad was the only Indian institute represented among this year’s finalists, alongside institutions such as UIUC, UC Berkeley, Cornell, and Cambridge.

ISIT is a premier international conference dedicated to advancing information theory and allied areas. Being nominated for the prestigious J K Wolf Award is highly competitive, with only six student-authored papers chosen as finalists among hundreds of accepted papers.

July 2025