Information Geometry - About the Editors
Nihat Ay (Editor-in-Chief)
Nihat Ay studied mathematics and physics at the Ruhr University Bochum and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Leipzig in 2001. In 2003 and 2004, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute (now the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at UC Berkeley). After his postdoctoral stay in the USA he became an assistant professor (wissenschaftlicher Assistent) at the Mathematical Institute of the Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen. From September 2005 to March 2021, he worked as Max Planck Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig where he was heading the group Information Theory of Cognitive Systems. As professor of the Santa Fe Institute he is involved in research on complexity and robustness theory. Since December 2013, he is affiliated with the Leipzig University as Honorary Professor for Information Geometry. He is currently working at the Hamburg University of Technology where he is building up a new institute, the institute of Data Science Foundations, as part of the Technology and Innovation Center at the Hamburg Innovation Port (this opens in a new tab).
Research areas: Learning and Evolution; Embodied Cognitive Systems; Complexity; Robustness; Information Geometry; Graphical Models and Causality; Information Theory
Frank Nielsen (Co-Editor)
Frank Nielsen is a senior researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc., Tokyo, Japan.
He received his PhD in computational geometry (1996) and his habilitation to lead research in visual computing (2006).
He taught high performance computing for data science at Ecole Polytechnique (France).
His research focuses on the principles and design of distances, and computational methods in information geometry with applications to machine learning and data science. He co-organizes the biannual international conference on geometric science of information (GSI) (this opens in a new tab).
Jun Zhang (Co-Editor)
Jun Zhang is a Professor of Psychology and Professor of Statistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA.
He received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California Berkeley in 1991. He did a postdoc at Salk Institute with Dr. Terrance Sejnowski, and started as an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan in 1992, where he became a Full Professor in 2007. He has served, among other professional roles, as vice president and president of the Society for Mathematical Psychology, and as council member and governing board member of the Federation of Associations for Brain and Behavioral Sciences. He is an elected Fellow of the Psychonomic Society and the Association for Psychological Sciences.
His main research in information geometry has been on divergence functions, embedding functions, deformation models, embedding functions, and linking statistical structure to symplectic, (para-)Hermitian, and (para-)Kahler geometry. He is also interested in application of information geometry to theoretical physics (geometric mechanics, thermodynamics, and quantum information), and to neural-cognitive and machine learning systems.