In this article, we commemorate Joy Thomas, who sadly passed away in 2020. Joy is best known for his seminal textbook Elements of Information Theory, coauthored with his Ph.D. advisor the late Thomas Cover. We also catalog some of Joy’s [...]

In recent decades, cultural heritage research—and in particular art investigation—has been undergoing a digital revolution. This is due both to improvements in the digitization and the acquisition of artifact’s images generated using traditional 2-D imaging methods as well as the growing adoption of a range of more recently introduced spectroscopic imaging t...

An important question in cultural heritage concerns the make process of an artifact. Understanding the make process provides insight related to the origin, techniques, and craftsmanship used to make the artifact. Searching for tool marks or traces left by the artist’s hand is one way of retrieving clues related to the make process. X-ray computed tomography ...

Ancient texts are unique evidence providing a glimpse into the thoughts, day-to-day life, and culture of people of long-gone eras. Paleography, the study of writing, aims at documenting the inscriptions, transliterating the texts, reconstructing their historical context, and studying the evolution of writing itself. The digital revolution gave rise to comput...

This article reviews belief propagation (BP) for classical inference problems and describes its extension to quantum systems, which is known as BP with quantum messages (BPQM). Since BP plays a key role in many low-complexity decoders for error-correcting codes, BPQM enables the practical extension of these decoders to classical quantum channels, such as the...