Distributed Compression, the Information Bottleneck and Cloud Radio Access Networks: A Unified Information Theoretic View

Speaker: Prof. Shlomo Shamai (Shitz)
Affiliation: Technion − Israel Institute of Technology

**Please Note time change to 12:00 p.m.

Abstract:  This talk focuses on connections between relatively recent notions and variants of the Information Bottleneck and classical information theoretic frameworks such as: Remote Source-Coding; Information Combining; Common Reconstruction; The Wyner-Ahlswede-Korner Problem; The Efficiency of Investment Information; CEO Source Coding under Log-Loss and others.

We overview the uplink Cloud Radio Access Networks (CRAN) with oblivious processing, which is an attractive model for future wireless systems and highlight the basic connections to distributed Gaussian information bottleneck framework. For this setting, the optimal trade-offs between rates (i.e. complexity) and information (i.e. accuracy) in the discrete and vector Gaussian schemes is determined, taking an information-estimation viewpoint. Further, the performance cost of the simple ‘oblivious’ universal processing in CRAN systems is exemplified via novel bounding techniques.

The concluding overview and outlook addresses in a unified way the dual problem of the privacy funnel and recent observations on the additive noise channels with a helper. Further, connections to the finite block length bottleneck features (related to the Courtade-Kumar conjecture) and entropy complexity measures (rather than mutual-information) are shortly discussed. Some challenging problems are mentioned such as the characterization of the optimal power limited inputs (‘features’) maximizing the ‘accuracy’ for the Gaussian information bottleneck, under ‘complexity’ constraints.

Biography:  Professor Shlomo Shamai (Shitz) is a distinguished professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Technion − Israel Institute of Technology.  Professor Shamai is an information theorist and winner of the 2011 Shannon Award.  Prof. Shamai (Shitz) received the B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Technion, in 1975, 1981 and 1986 respectively.  During 1975-1985, he was with the Israeli Communications Research Labs.  Since 1986, he is with the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, where he is now the William Fondiller Professor of Telecommunications.  His research areas cover a wide spectrum of topics in information theory and statistical communications.  Prof. Shamai is an IEEE Fellow and a member of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI).

For more information, contact Prof. Suhas Diggavi (suhas@ee.ucla.edu)

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Feb 07, 2020
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

Location:
EE-IV Shannon Room #54-134
420 Westwood Plaza - 5th Flr., Los Angeles CA 90095