Welcome to the course on "Physics of Information Technology"
Information technology has emerged as the most dominant technology of the last century and in this course we will learn the various physical principles that go into its spectacular development. Most importantly, we will learn how to quantify the notion of information and how to extend such ideas to understand stochastic processes in general but also physical sources, transmitters and detectors of information.
Lately, in physics, the notion of information has caused a paradigm shift in the way we look at things: a large fraction of physicists, starting from high energy to quantum technologists are starting to believe that probably all of physics is fundamentally a study of information, its generation, flow and detection and probably all traditional laws of physics can eventually be cast in the language of information theory.
In this course we will learn why information is emerging as a central concept in physics. We will also learn physical theories and tools that are used used to generate, transmit and detect information.
On grading policy:
After discussion and a survey with the class, the grading policy has been decided as:
1) 50 % for home work assignments (based on returned copies, class participations and discussions).
2) 20% for mid-semester exam
3) 30% for end-semester exam
Teaching Assistance: Prof. Sagar Chakraborty has kindly agreed to sit through the video lectures and ask questions. Besides him, Ateesh and Shubham will also help us going through the course. All of their email ids are in the handout of the first lecture.