Place: 2460 A.V. Williams

Time: 2:00 PM

Host: Dr. Anthony Ephremides

Abstract: Finite-alphabet signals corrupted by discrete noisy channels arise naturally in a wide range of applications spanning fields such as statistics, engineering, and computer science. Examples include DNA sequence analysis and processing, text correction, Hidden Markov model state estimation, and image denoising. While the field of filtering or denoising of continuous-alphabet signals has a long history, the field of discrete denoising has seen far less progress.

In many discrete denoising applications, a good model for the randomness of the noisy channel is known, whereas the statistical description of the noiseless signal is either unknown or too complex. It is therefore of considerable interest to pose the problem of discrete universal denoising where no knowledge exists about the statistics of the noiseless signal while the channel statistics are assumed known.

I will present the DUDE algorithm for discrete universal denoising which has linear complexity and attains universal optimality in a stochastic sense as well as a stronger semi-stochastic sense. I will also show several DUDE-based algorithms for channel decoding of systematically encoded redundant data.

Joint work with E. Ordentlich, G. Seroussi, M. Weinberger and T. Weissman

Biography: Sergio Verdu is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.

Professor Verdu is a recipient of several paper awards including the IEEE Donald Fink Paper Award, a Golden Jubilee Paper Award from the Information Theory Society, the 1998 Information Theory Society Paper Award, and the 2002 Leonard G. Abraham Prize Award from the IEEE Communications Society. He also received a Millennium Medal from the IEEE and the 2000 Frederick E. Terman Award from the American Society for Engineering Education.

Professor Verdu served as Associate Editor for Shannon Theory of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. In 1997 he served as President of the IEEE Information Theory Society. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory.

He authored the text "Multiuser Detection" published by Cambridge University Press in 1998, and served as Guest Editor of the 1998 Special Commemorative Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, reprinted as the IEEE Press volume "Information Theory: Fifty years of Discovery.