Network Source Coding: Pipe Dream or Promise?

Michelle Effros
Caltech

Monday, October 22, 2007 at 1:00PM

54-134 Engineering IV Building
Refreshments Served

Abstract: Network source codes are data compression algorithms for networks characterized by multiple transmitters, multiple receivers, multiple intermediate nodes, or some combination of these three. While simple examples of the potential power of network source codes are easy to construct, a comprehensive solution to the network source coding problem seems elusive. Barriers to progress include the difficulty of the problems themselves, and issues -- such as the failure of separation -- that call the very concept of network source coding into question. I will give a brief glimpse into causes for hope, sorrow, and celebration and speculate a bit on the road that lies ahead.

Biography: Michelle Effros received the B.S. degree with distinction in 1989, the M.S. degree in 1990, and the Ph.D. degree in 1994, all in electrical engineering from Stanford University. She joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology in 1994 and is currently a Professor of Electrical Engineering. Her research interests include information theory, network coding, data compression, communications, pattern recognition and image processing. She received Stanford's Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Scholastic Award (for excellence in engineering) in 1989, the Hughes Masters Full-Study Fellowship in 1989, the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship in 1990, the AT&T Ph.D. Scholarship in 1993, the NSF CAREER Award in 1995, the Charles Lee Powell Foundation Award in 1997, the Richard Feynman-Hughes Fellowship in 1997, an Okawa Research Grant in 2000, and was cited by Technology Review as one of the world's top 100 young innovators in 2002. She is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, and the IEEE Information Theory, Signal Processing, and Communications societies. She served as the Editor of the IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter from 1995 to 1998 and as a Member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society from 1998 to 2003. She has served on the IEEE Signal Processing Society Image and Multi-Dimensional Signal Processing (IMDSP) Technical Committee since 2001. She was an Associate Editor for the joint special issue on Networking and Information Theory in the IEEE Transaction on Information Theory and the IEEE/ACM Transaction on Networking and is currently Associate Editor for Source Coding for the IEEE Transaction on Information Theory.