Event
Advanced Networks Colloquium: Amos Lapidoth, "Source Coding with Lists and Renyi Entropy"
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
5:00 p.m.
2168 A.V. Williams Bldg.
Prakash Narayan
prakash@umd.edu
The Advanced Networks Colloquium
Source Coding with Lists and Renyi Entropy
Amos Lapidoth
Professor of Information Theory
ETH Zurich
Host
Prakash Narayan
Abstract
It is generally accepted that Renyi entropy is fundamental to Information Theory, even if its operational meaning is not as compelling as that of Shannon entropy. In this talk I shall discuss a variation on the source-coding problem whose solution is the Renyi entropy of the source. This problem, which may also be of interest in its own right, will allow us to derive many of the properties of Renyi entropy using information-theoretic arguments. The problem will also provide an operational meaning to the lesser-known conditional Renyi entropy. I shall conclude with extensions to lossy source-coding. Based on joint work with Christoph Bunte.
Biography
Amos Lapidoth received the B.A. degree in mathematics (1986), the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering (1986), and the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering (1990) all from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1995. In the years 1995-1999 he was an Assistant and Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was the KDD Career Development Associate Professor in Communications and Technology. He is now Professor of Information Theory at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He is the author of the book A Foundation in Digital Communication, published by Cambridge University Press in 2009. His research interests are in digital communications and information theory.
