SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for March 03, 2009
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The Role of Feedback in Communication
Tue, Mar 03, 2009 @ 01:30 PM - 02:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Young-Han Kim,
UC San DiegoAbstract: Many common communication situations are over inherently two-way channels, such as telephone systems, digital subscriber lines (DSL), cellular networks, and the Internet. In fact, even ``point-to-point'' systems, where the end goal is to transfer information in one direction, often give rise to two-way communication scenarios due to the presence of feedback. In such systems, one can receive feedback from the other end of the channel, which can be used to improve the quality of communication. Although feedback is present in many communication systems, and is being used in certain primitive forms as in channel estimation and automatic repeat request (ARQ), the theory behind its use is far from complete.In this talk, we focus on two recent findings in information theory to discuss the role of feedback in communication networks. Our first result characterizes the feedback capacity of nonwhite Gaussian channels, answering a long-standing open problem studied by many researchers, and shows how dramatic performance improvements can be achieved with optimal use of feedback. Our second result proposes an efficient and robust coding method for more realistic systems with noisy feedback. Although this coding method is still at a conceptual level, it brings up a new paradigm of cross-layer design.Based on joint work with Tsachy Weissman and Amos Lapidoth.Biography: Young-Han Kim is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Professor Kim's research primarily focuses on network information theory and the role of feedback in communication networks.
More broadly, he is interested in statistical signal processing and information theory, with applications in communication, control, computation, networking, data compression, and learning.Professor Kim received his B.S. degree with honors in Electrical Engineering from Seoul National University, in 1996, where he was a recipient of the General Electric Foundation Scholarship. After a three-and-half-year stint as a software architect at Tong Yang Systems, Seoul, Korea, working on several industry projects such as developing the communication infrastructure for then newly opening Incheon International Airport, he resumed his graduate studies at Stanford University, and received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering (M.S. degrees in Statistics and in Electrical Engineering) in 2006. Professor Kim is a recipient of the 2008 NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. Host: Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu, EEB 540, x04667
Location: Frank R. Seaver Science Center (SSC) - 319
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Third-Generation Conversational Interfaces
Tue, Mar 03, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Giuseppe RiccardiAbstract: Communicating with machines is becoming pervasive to the point we rely entirely on them to find (vital) information over the web, perform on-line (trans)actions and communicate with people speaking different languages. In the last decade we have seen tremendous research and technology advancement in the speech and text based interfaces. We are now faced with the problem of overcoming their limitations and investigate multimodal input, adaptive interfaces, communicative paradigms and tame task complexity. In this talk we discuss new research towards third-generation conversational interfaces.Bio: Prof. Riccardi received his Laurea degree in Electrical Engineering and Master in Information Technology, in 1991, from the University of Padua and CEFRIEL Research Center, respectively. From 1990-1993 he collaborated with Alcatel-Telettra Research Laboratories (Milan, Italy). In 1995 he received his Phd in Electrical Engineering from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Padua, Italy. From 1993-2005, he worked first at AT&T Bell Laboratories and then AT&T Labs-Research where he worked in the Speech and Language Processing Lab. In 2005 he joined the faculty of Engineering at University of Trento (Italy) and is affiliated with the interdisciplinary Department of Information and Communication Technology and Center for Mind/Brain Sciences. He is the founder and director of the Adaptive Multimodal Information and Interfaces (AMI2) Lab.
Prof. Riccardi's research on stochastic finite state machines for speech and language processing has been applied to a wide range of domains for task automation. He and his colleagues designed the state-of-the-art AT&T spoken language system ranked first in the 1994 DARPA ATIS evaluation. He pioneered the speech and language research in spontaneous speech for the well-known "How May I Help You?" research program which led to breakthrough speech services. His research on learning finite state automata and transducers has lead to the creation of the first large scale finite state chain decoding for machine translation (Anuvaad).
Prof. Riccardi has co-authored more than 80 papers and 25 patents in the field of speech processing, speech recognition, understanding and machine translation. His current research interests are language modeling and acquisition, language understanding, spoken/multimodal dialog, affective interfaces, machine learning and machine translation. Prof. Riccardi has received many national and international awards and more recently the Marie Curie Research Excellence grant by the European Commission and 2009 IEEE SPS Best Paper Award. Host: Professor Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mary Francis
