Ilan Shomorony
Associate Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Siebel School of Computing and Data Science (affiliated)
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Email: ilans@illinois.edu
Office: 313 Coordinated Science Laboratory
Research
I work across information theory, machine learning, and computational biology, studying problems involving limited observations, randomness, and underlying data structure. I look for practical problems that motivate new theoretical questions and new efficient methods for analyzing, reconstructing, and storing information.
Prospective students
If you are interested in working with me, please take a look at my research areas and selected papers. When reaching out, briefly describe your background, what interests you about my work, and any relevant coursework or projects.
Undergraduates interested in research are also welcome to get in touch.
All updates
2026
My student Aditya Ravi defended his PhD thesis. Congrats, Aditya!
2025
My student Seiyun Shin successfully defended his PhD thesis. Congrats, Seiyun!
My student Kel Levick successfully defended her PhD thesis. Congrats, Kel!
I'm teaching a new course ECE598IS: Information Theory and High-Dimensional Statistics
I am excited to be one of the speakers at the 2025 North American School of Information Theory!
The school will take place at the University of Minnesota from 6/16 to 6/20. Full schedule and registration information for students can be found here.
Paper "Capacity of Frequency-based Channels: Encoding Information in Molecular Concentrations" with Yuval Gerzon and Nir Weinberger accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.
I gave a talk at the Caltech EE Systems Seminar.
I gave a talk at the Purdue Center for Science of Information.
My student Kayvon Mazooji successfully defended his PhD thesis. Congrats, Kayvon!
Three papers accepted to ISIT 2025:
- Fragmentation in Data Deduplication Systems I: The Stretch Metric with Yun-Han Li, Jin Sima, and Olgica Milenkovic
- Fragmentation in Data Deduplication Systems II: the Jump Metric with Yun-Han Li, Jin Sima, and Olgica Milenkovic
- Guaranteed Recovery of Unambiguous Clusters with Kayvon Mazooji
I gave a talk at the UCSD Center for Memory and Recording Research.
I gave a talk at ITA titled "Can coding reduce fragmentation in deduplicated storage systems?". (slides
I gave a talk at the USC ECE Seminar.
I gave a talk at the UCLA ECE Seminar.
Paper "Dynamic DBSCAN with Euler Tour Sequences" with my student Seiyun Shin and collaborator Peter Macgregor accepted to AISTATS 2025
2024
I gave a talk at the University of Minnesota ECE Colloquium.
Paper "Prioritized Federated Learning: Leveraging Non-Priority Clients for Targeted Model Improvement" with my student Aditya Ravi accepted to the Transactions on Machine Learning Research
Paper "Substring Density Estimation from Traces" with my student Kayvon Mazooji accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Paper "An Information Theory for Out-of-Order Media With Applications in DNA Data Storage" with Aditya Ravi and Alireza Vahid published in a special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communications
Paper "Faster Maximum Inner Product Search in High Dimensions" with my Mo Tiwari et al. accepted to ICML 2024
Paper "Fast Multiple Sequence Alignment via Multi-Armed Bandits" with my student Kayvon Mazooji accepted to ISMB 2024
Paper "Fundamental Limits of Reference-Based Sequence Reordering" with Nir Weinberger published at IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
2023
My student Grant Greenberg successfully defended his PhD thesis. Congrats, Grant!
Paper "The Metagenomic Binning Problem: Clustering Markov Sequences" with my student Grant Greenberg published at the IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communications
Paper "DNA Merge-Sort: A Family of Nested Varshamov-Tenengolts Reassembly Codes for Out-of-Order Media" with Sajjad Nassirpour and Alireza Vahid published at IEEE Transactions on Communications
Paper "LexicHash: sequence similarity estimation via lexicographic comparison of hashes" with my students Grant Greenberg and Aditya Ravi published in Bioinformatics
Two papers accepted to NeurIPS 2023:
- Efficient Learning of Linear Graph Neural Networks via Node Subsampling with Seiyun Shin and Han Zhao
- BanditPAM++: Faster k-medoids Clustering with Mo Tiwari, Ryan Kang, Donghyun Lee, Sebastian Thrun and Martin Zhang
Two of my students, Seiyun Shin and Kel Levick, selected as Mavis Future Faculty Fellows!
Five papers accepted to ISIT 2023:
- Substring Density Estimation from Traces with Kayvon Mazooji
- Finding a Burst of Positives via Nonadaptive Semiquantitative Group Testing with Yun-Han Li, Ryan Gabrys, Jin Sima, and Olgica Milenkovic
- On Constant-Weight Binary B2-Sequences with Jin Sima, Yun-Han Li, and Olgica Milenkovic
- Fundamental Limits of Reference-Based Sequence Reordering with Nir Weinberger
I am one of the organizers of the 6th Health Data Analytics Summit. It is a fully online event and you can register for free here!
I gave a talk at the Stanford ISL Colloquium on "An Information Theory for Out-of-Order Information" (Slides
I gave an invited talk at ITA on the adaptive power method. (Slides
2022
Paper "Adaptive power method: Eigenvector estimation from sampled data" with Han Zhao and our student Seiyun Shin accepted to the conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory (ALT)
I wrote a preview article on "Data-driven precision medicine through the analysis of biological functional modules" for Cell Reports Medicine.
Paper "CVQVAE: A representation learning method for multiomics single cell data integration" with students Tianyu Liu and Grant Greenberg accepted as a spotlight in the Machine Learning in Computational Biology (MLCB) meeting
Paper "MABSplit: Faster Forest Training Using Multi-Armed Bandits" with Mo Tiwari et al. accepted to to NeurIPS 2022
Paper “Improving Bacterial Genome Assembly Using a Test of Strand Orientation” with my student Grant Greenberg accepted to ECCB 2022
Two papers accepted to ISIT 2022:
- "Capacity of the Shotgun Sequencing Channel" with Aditya Ravi and Alireza Vahid
- Fundamental Limits of Multi-Sample Flow Graph Decomposition with Kayvon Mazooji, Sreeram Kannan and Bill Noble
Paper A Game-Theoretically Optimal Defense Paradigm against Traffic Analysis Attacks using MultiPath Routing and Deception with Masoumeh Abolfathi et al. accepted to SACMAT 2022
Paper “JIND: Joint Integration and Discrimination for Automated Single-Cell Annotation” with Mohit Goyal et al. published at Bioinformatics
Our Foundations and Trends monograph "Information-Theoretic Foundations of DNA Data Storage" is out!
Paper "Coded Shotgun Sequencing" with my student Aditya Ravi published at the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory
Paper "Achieving the Capacity of a DNA Storage Channel with Linear Coding Schemes" with my student Kel Levick accepted to CISS 2022
2021
Paper "Torn-Paper Coding" with Alireza Vahid accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Two papers accepted to ISIT 2021:
- "Capacity of the Torn Paper Channel with Lost Pieces" with Aditya Ravi and Alireza Vahid
- "Sketching and Sequence Alignment: A Rate-Distortion Perspective" with Govinda Kamath
Paper “DNA-Based Storage: Models and Fundamental Limits” with Reinhard Heckel accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
I was awarded the NSF CAREER Award!
2020
Paper “Private DNA Sequencing: Hiding Information in Discrete Noise” with my student Kayvon Mazooji and collaborator Roy Dong accepted to ITW 2020 (preprint.
Paper “Communicating over the Torn-Paper Channel” with Alireza Vahid accepted to Globecom 2020. A longer version of the paper is available here.
Paper “Spectral Jaccard Similarity: A new approach to estimating pairwise sequence alignments” published at Cell Patterns (open access.
Paper “Capacity of the Erasure Shuffling Channel” with my student Seiyun Shin was presented at ICASSP 2020 as part of a special session on “Signal Processing and Coding for Macromolecular Storage and Computing”.
I gave an invited talk at the ITA Workshop on “Pairwise alignment of DNA sequences via spectral Jaccard similarity” (Manuscript
Paper “An unsupervised learning approach to identify novel signatures of health and disease from multimodal data” with collaborators from Human Longevity is now published on Genome Medicine.
2019
Paper “Spectral Jaccard Similarity: A new approach to estimating pairwise sequence alignments” accepted to RECOMB 2020 (bioRxiv preprint.
Paper “The Metagenomic Binning Problem: Clustering Markov Sequences” with my student Grant Greenberg to be presented at ITW 2019 (Manuscript.
Paper “Capacity Results for the Noisy Shuffling Channel” with Reinhard Heckel to be presented at ISIT 2019 (Manuscript.
I organized a session on “Computational Methods for Genomics and Biological Data” at CISS 2019.