  Information complexity is the interactive analogue of Shannon's classical
information theory. In recent years this field has emerged as a powerful tool
for proving strong communication lower bounds, and for addressing some of the
major open problems in communication complexity and circuit complexity. A
notable achievement of information complexity is the breakthrough in
understanding of the fundamental direct sum and direct product conjectures,
which aim to quantify the power of parallel computation. This survey provides a
brief introduction to information complexity, and overviews some of the recent
progress on these conjectures and their tight relationship with the fascinating
problem of compressing interactive protocols.
