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Adaptive physical and biological systems continually process fluctuating information from their environments. When the environment is nonstationary, inference itself becomes a nonequilibrium process with thermodynamic cost. We analyse a…

We study the maximum efficiency of a Carnot cycle heat engine based on a small system. It is revealed that due to the finiteness of the system, irreversibility may arise when the working substance contacts with a heat bath. As a result,…

Physical systems driven away from equilibrium by an external controller dissipate heat to the environment; the excess entropy production in the thermal reservoir can be interpreted as a "cost" to transform the system in a finite time. The…

The problem of the insensitivity of the macroscopic behavior of any thermodynamical system to partitioning generates a bias between the reproducibility of its macroscopic behavior viewed as the simplest form of causality and its long-term…

Inference is the task of drawing conclusions about unobserved variables given observations of related variables. Applications range from identifying diseases from symptoms to classifying economic regimes from price movements. Unfortunately,…

Optimization of cyclic stochastic heat engines, a topic spanning decades of research, commonly assumes fixed control or response parameters at discrete points in the cycle-a limitation that often leads to experimentally impractical…

I give a quick overview of some of the theoretical background necessary for using modern non-equilibrium statistical physics to investigate the thermodynamics of computation. I first present some of the necessary concepts from information…

Low-dissipation model and the endoreversible model of heat engines are two of the most commonly studied models of machines in finite-time thermodynamics. In this paper, we compare the performance characteristics of these two models under…

A heat engine operating on the basis of the Carnot cycle is considered, where the mechanical work performed is dissipated within the engine at the temperature of the warmer isotherm and the resulting heat is added to the engine together…

We consider the problem of identifying the most influential nodes for a spreading process on a network when prior knowledge about structure and dynamics of the system is incomplete or erroneous. Specifically, we perform a numerical analysis…

We derive a bound on the efficiency of thermal engines that can be sharper than Carnot's limit. It is a function of statistical correlations between the engine internal state and Hamiltonian, can be saturated even in finite-time cycles, and…

Prognostics is a process of assessing the extent of deviation or degradation of a product from its expected normal operating condition, and then, based on continuous monitoring, predicting the future reliability of the product. By being…

The study of intelligent systems explains behaviour in terms of economic rationality. This results in an optimization principle involving a function or utility, which states that the system will evolve until the configuration of maximum…

A communication theory for a transmitter broadcasting to many receivers is presented. In this case energetic considerations cannot be neglected as in Shannon theory. It is shown that, when energy is assigned to the information bit,…

Irreversible information processing cannot be carried out without some inevitable thermodynamical work cost. This fundamental restriction, known as Landauer's principle, is increasingly relevant today, as the energy dissipation of computing…

Thermodynamic entropy is not an entirely satisfactory measure of information of a quantum state. This entropy for an unknown pure state is zero, although repeated measurements on copies of such a pure state do communicate information. In…

Iron loss determination in the magnetic core of an electrical machine, such as a motor or a transformer, is formulated as an inverse heat source problem. The sensor positions inside the object are optimized in order to minimize the…

This Colloquium is a fast journey through the build-up of key thermodynamical concepts, i.e. work, heat and irreversibility -- and how they relate to information. Born at the time of industrial revolution to optimize the exploitation of…

A Brownian information machine extracts work from a heat bath through a feedback process that exploits the information acquired in a measurement. For the paradigmatic case of a particle trapped in a harmonic potential, we determine how…

Depending on context, the term entropy is used for a thermodynamic quantity, a~measure of available choice, a quantity to measure information, or, in the context of statistical inference, a maximum configuration predictor. For systems in…