January 16
Wednesday 1:30pm
369 Link Hall

 Prof. Aaron Wagner

Title: A New Look at the Fundamental Limits of Lossy Network Compression

Speaker:  Professor Aaron Wagner, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University

Abstract: Suppose we wish to compress a stereo audio recording consisting of a left and a right channel. If both channels are available to a centralized compressor, then the fundamental limit of the compression (how much the data can be compressed without sacrificing quality) have long been known. But what if there are two compressors, one who sees only the left channel and one who sees only the right channel? This general problem arises in a variety of contexts, and the fundamental limit of the compression has been a long-standing open problem in information theory.
         I will discuss the resolution of this problem and show that an “off-the-shelf” compression architecture consisting of a combination of existing compression schemes is optimal. I will also discuss recent extensions to more than two channels.
         This is joint work with Saurabh Tavildar and Pramod Viswanath.

About the Speaker:  Professor Wagner is an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. During the 2005-2006 academic year, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell. He did his graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
          Professor Wagner has received a number of awards for his research including the NSF CAREER award (2007), the David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize from the U.C. Berkeley EECS Dept. (2006), and the Bernard Friedman Memorial Prize in Applied Mathematics from the U.C. Berkeley Dept. of Mathematics (2005).
          His research consists of information theory, networking, communications, and compression. His particular interests include the information-theoretic limits of distributed compression, network information theory, connections between information theory and queueing theory, the role of feedback in communications, and (recently) applications of information theory to computational linguistics.
         Professor Wagner directs a growing group of talented graduate student researchers. This group does not have a fancy name.

February 6
Wednesday 1:30pm
369 Link Hall

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Prof. Anna Scaglione

Title:  The Decentralized Estimation Officer Problem:
           Distortion Bounds and Scaling Laws

Speaker:  Professor Anna Scaglione
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Cornell University

Abstract: We study the decentralized version of the classical rate constrained Gaussian parameter estimation problem referred to as the Central Estimation Officer (CEO) problem which we refer to as the Decentralized Estimation Officers (DEO) problem. In it N sensors observe an independently corrupted version of an infinite i.i.d. sequence of samples from a Gaussian source, in additive Gaussian noise. 
          Unlike the CEO case, the sensors in our study are also the estimation officers and share the task is of reconstructing the quantity of interest (the samples of the source), without a central fusion node, better than what they are capable of with their local observations. The objective of the analysis is that of exploring how the DEO problem scales in terms of power and delay compared to the centralized CEO architecture. In the DEO case, we find achievable distortion rate functions assuming that the communication protocol computes the Linear Minimum Mean Squared Error estimate using a rate and energy constrained average consensus protocol.

Biography:  Anna Scaglione received her 'Laurea' (MSc.) degree in 1995 and PhD degree in 1999 from the University of Rome, "La Sapienza". She is currently associate professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University; prior to this she was assistant professor at Cornell University from 2001 to 2006 and, in the year 2000-2001, at the University of New Mexico. She is first author of the paper that received the 2000 IEEE Signal Processing Transactions Best Paper Award; she has also received the NSF Career Award in 2002 and she is co-recipient of the Ellersick Best Paper Award (MILCOM 2005).
         Her expertise is in the broad area of signal processing for communication systems. Her current research focuses on cooperative networks and sensors' systems.

February 13 
Wednesday 1:30pm
369 Link Hall

Prof. Vijayakumar Bhagavatula

Title: Signal Processing Approaches for Face and Iris Recognition

Speaker:  Prof. Vijayakumar Bhagavatula 
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh

Abstract:  In the increasingly e-commerce oriented society, verifying a user’s identity is critical for carrying out financial and other transactions with trust. Most current authentication systems are password based making them susceptible to problems such as forgetting the password or passwords being stolen. One way to overcome these problems is to employ biometrics (e.g., fingerprints, face images, iris images, palm prints, etc.) for authentication. Many biometric modalities produce images and biometric verification (1: matching) and identification (1:N matching) involves matching these images. Many conventional biometric image matching methods are based on segmenting the regions of interest, extracting the features in the image domain and applying classifiers to separate these features. However, there are advantages to using signal processing methods that work in the spatial frequency domain. These advantages include shift-invariance (i.e., the object of interest can be off-center), no need for segmentation, graceful degradation and closed-form solutions. This talk will provide an overview of spatial frequency domain methods to authenticate or identify a person based on their biometrics. In particular, the application of these methods on face and iris images will be discussed, including results from the face recognition grand challenge (FRGC) and the iris challenge evaluation (ICE), conducted by NIST.

Bio:  Vijayakumar Bhagavatula received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh and since 1982, he has been a faculty member in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at CMU where he is now a Professor. He served as the Associate Head of the ECE Department from 1994 to 1996 and as its Acting Department Head during 2004-2005. In 2003, he received the Eta Kappa Nu Most Outstanding Teacher award in ECE Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Professor Kumar's research interests include Pattern Recognition (for automatic target recognition and biometrics applications) and Coding and Signal Processing for Data Storage Systems and for Digital Communications. He has authored or co-authored more than 450 technical papers and one book entitled Correlation Pattern Recognition. He served as a Topical Editor for the Information Processing division of Applied Optics and is currently serving as an Associate Editor of IEEE Trans. Information Forensics and Security. He is actively involved in the organizing committees of various biometrics conferences, including the role of a co-chair for the 2008 SPIE conference on Biometrics Technology for Human Identification. Professor Kumar is a member of Sigma Xi, a senior member of IEEE, a Fellow of SPIE - The International Society of Optical Engineering, a Fellow of Optical Society of America (OSA) and a Fellow of the Intl. Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR).

February 27
Wednesday 1:30pm
369 Link Hall

Prof. Ankur Srivastava

Title:  Design Schemes for Countering Fabrication Randomness in Large Scale ICs

Speaker:  Professor Ankur Srivastava, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland

ABSTRACT:   Continued scaling of fabrication dimensions has lead to increased susceptibility of the designs to fabrication randomness. This causes a spread in performance and power dissipation leading to yield loss and reduction in profitability of the semiconductor industry. In this talk I will outline design schemes for countering the effects of such randomness. The key idea is to explicitly model the yield loss while optimizing the designs for power/performance and account for it in a holistic way.

BIO:  Dr. Srivastava received his Bachelor in Technology from IIT Delhi in 1998, MS in computer Engineering in 2000 from Northwestern University and PhD in Computer Science in 2002 from UCLA. He received the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Computer Science Department of UCLA in 2002, Best Paper Award in 2007 for his work on post fabrication tunability at International Symposium on Physical Design and George Corcoran Outstanding Teaching Award from the ECE Department of UMD in 2007. He is an Assistant Professor in the ECE department of University of Maryland.

March 19 
Wednesday 1:30pm
369 Link Hall

Distinguished Professor Mikhail Atallah

Title:  Privacy Issues in Collaborative Computing

Speaker:  Dr. Mikhail Atallah, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Purdue University

Abstract: Even though collaborative computing can yield substantial economic, social, and scientific benefits, a serious impediment to fully achieving that potential is a reluctance to share data, for fear of losing control over its subsequent dissemination and usage. An organization's most valuable and useful data is often proprietary/confidential, or the law may forbid its disclosure or regulate the form of that disclosure. We survey security technologies that mitigate this problem, and discuss research directions towards enforcing the data owner's approved purposes on the data used in collaborative computing. These include techniques for cooperatively computing answers without revealing any private data, even though the computed answers depend on all the participants' private data. They also include computational outsourcing, where computationally weak entities use computationally powerful entities to carry out intensive computing tasks without revealing to them either their inputs or the computed answers.


Short Bio:   Mikhail Atallah holds the rank of Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. His research interests include information security, distributed computing, algorithms, and computational geometry. A Fellow of both the ACM and IEEE, he has served on the editorial boards of top journals, and on the program committees of top conferences and workshops. He was keynote and invited speaker at many national and international meetings, and a speaker eight times in the Distinguished Colloquium Series of top Computer Science Departments. He was selected in 1999 as one of the best teachers in the history of Purdue and included in a permanent wall display of Purdue's best teachers past and present. He is a co-founder of Arxan Technologies Inc.

April 9  Wednesday 1:30pm 369 Link

Professor En-hui Yang Canada Research Chair, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Title: Interactive Encoding and Decoding: A New Coding Paradigm for Network Source Coding
Speaker: En-hui Yang, Fellow of IEEE, Professor & Canada Research Chair, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Abstract: In the traditional source coding framework, an encoder pretty much acts like a master and a decoder acts like a slave simply executing the instructions from the encoder. In network source coding scenarios, however, this framework has many drawbacks including poor compression performance and lack of universal coding algorithms, and hence is arguably not practical.

In this talk, we will instead present a new source coding paradigm called interactive encoding and decoding whereby the encoder and decoder interact with each other until a certain task is accomplished, and analyze its performance for a simple source network in which a finite alphabet source X is to be encoded and transmitted to the decoder, i.e., to be learnt by the decoder, and another finite alphabet source Y correlated with X is available only to the decoder as a helper. We measure the performance in terms of the average number of bits per symbol exchanged by the encoder and decoder until the task is accomplished, i.e., the sum of the forward rate in bits per symbol from the encoder to the decoder and the feedback rate in bits per symbol from the decoder to the encoder. It is shown that (1) interactive encoding and decoding offers a first order performance gain over non-interactive encoding and decoding, i.e., Slepian-Wolf coding, for stationary, nonergodic source pairs (X, Y) and a second order performance gain for independent and identically distributed source pairs (X, Y), and (2) one can easily convert any classic universal data compression algorithm (with side information available to both the encoder and decoder) to a universal interactive encoding and decoding algorithm, whereas universal Slepian-Wolf coding algorithms in a strict sense do not exist.


Short Bio: En-hui Yang is now a Professor and Canada Research Chair in information theory and multimedia compression. He is the founding director of the Leitch-University of Waterloo multimedia communications lab, and a co-founder of SlipStream Data Inc. (now a subsidiary of Research In Motion). He currently also serves as a general co-chair of the 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory and as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

He served, among many other roles, as a technical program vice-chair of the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME), the chair of the award committee for the 2004 Canadian Award in Telecommunications, a co-editor of the 2004 Special Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, a co-chair of the 2003 US National Science Foundation (NSF) workshop on the interface of Information Theory and Computer Science, and a co-chair of the 2003 Canadian Workshop on Information Theory. He also held a visiting professor position at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, from September 2003 to June 2004, positions of research associate and visiting scientist at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul, U.S.A., the University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany, and the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, U.S.A., from January 1993 to May 1997, and a faculty position (first as an assistant professor and then an associate professor) at Nankai University, Tianjin, China from 1991 to 1992.

Dr. Yang is a recipient of several research awards including the 1992 Tianjin Science and Technology Promotion Award for Young Investigators, the 1992 third Science and Technology Promotion Award of Chinese Ministry of Education, the 2000 Ontario Premier's Research Excellence Award, Canada, the 2000 Marsland Award for Research Excellence, University of Waterloo, the 2002 Ontario Distinguished Researcher Award, the 2007 Ontario Premier’s Catalyst Award for the Innovator of the Year, and the 2007 Manning Award of Distinction. Products based on his inventions and commercialized by SlipStream received the 2006 Ontario Global Traders Provincial Award and were deployed by over 2200 Service Providers in more than 50 countries, servicing millions of home and wireless subscribers worldwide every day.

April 30 Wednesday 1:30pm 369 Link

Prof. Sartaj Sahni

Title:  Sensor Deployment

Speaker:  Professor Sartaj Sahni
Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611

Abstract:  This talk addresses several problems that arise in sensor deployment. We begin by reviewing several forms of the sensor deployment problem—point and region coverage, coverage and connectivity, coverage lifetime, coverage quality—and then go over some of our recent results related to deployment and localization using difference of distances. These recent results include integer linear programming formulations for the deployment of heterogeneous sensors, approximation algorithms for minimum cost deployment, and a computational geometry method for event localization.

Bio
Sartaj Sahni is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of CISE Dept., Univ. of Florida. Dr. Sahni received his B.Tech. (Electrical Engineering) degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Cornell University. Dr. Sahni has published over two hundred and eighty research papers and written 15 texts. His research publications are on the design and analysis of efficient algorithms, parallel computing, interconnection networks, design automation, and medical algorithms.
      Dr. Sahni is a member of the European Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of IEEE, ACM, AAAS, and Minnesota Supercomputer Institute, and a Distinguished Alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He has received the IEEE Computer Society Taylor L. Booth Education Award, the IEEE Computer Society W. Wallace McDowell Award, and the 2003 ACM Karl Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. 
       He is a co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, a managing editor of the International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science, and a member of the editorial boards of four other journals. He has served as program committee chair, general chair, and been a keynote speaker at many conferences.