ECE Distinguished-Speaker Seminar - Codes for All Seasons

The Electrical and Computer Engineering department will be hosting a seminar featuring Emina Soljanin, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs. The topic of the seminar will be Codes for All Seasons

Abstract

Coding has traditionally been used at the physical layer in communication networks to recover from errors and erasures incurred in transmission and storage. There, it is easy to account for the cost of coding (e.g., in bandwidth and energy) and argue for its use. Yet, introducing codes in commercial products has not been easy. These days, novel schemes, which transcend the traditional role and place of coding, are being proposed and considered for implementation in real systems. Such schemes (e.g., rateless and network coding as well as coding for cloud storage) impact not only energy and bandwidth, but also network traffic and protocols. They make invalid various independence assumptions and complicate addressing and security schemes in content networking. We discuss coding in several transmission and storage network scenarios, question/explain its potential benefits, and speculate that, despite all previous successes, the hardest battles for getting codes into commercial systems are still in front of us.

Speaker Bio

Emina Soljanin is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs, where she works as an information, coding, and queueing theorist. Her interests and expertise are wide. Over the past quarter of the century, she has participated in numerous research and business projects, as diverse as power system optimization, magnetic recording, color space quantization, hybrid ARQ, network coding, data and network security, and quantum information theory and networking. Dr. Soljanin served as the Associate Editor for Coding Techniques, for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, on the Information Theory Society Board of Governors, and in various roles on other journal editorial boards and conference program committees. She is a co-organizer of the DIMACS 2001-2005 Special Focus on Computational Information Theory and Coding and 2011-2015 Special Focus on Cybersecurity. Dr. Soljanin has mentored many summer interns, Ph.D. students, and postdocs, and have co-authored two monographs on network coding. She is a member of AMS and IEEE Fellow.

For more information regarding this seminar, please contact Dr. Jia Wang via: Phone: 7-3696, Email: jwang@ece.iit.edu