On Optimal Fix-free Codes

Speaker: Serap Savari,
Texas A&M UniversityAbstract: Fix-free codes are variable length codes in which no codeword is the prefix or suffix of another codeword. They have been investigated for joint source-channel coding and have been applied within the video standards H.263+ and MPEG-4 because their property of efficient decoding in both the forward and backward directions assists with error resilience. They are also interesting for problems in information retrieval such as searching for patterns directly in compressed text. We provide a low-complexity heuristic to produce fix-free codes. The design of optimal or minimum-redundancy fix-free codes has been a longstanding open problem. We offer the first solution both to this problem and to a variation in which all codewords are also required to be palindromes.Biography: Serap Savari is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. She received four degrees from MIT. Professor Savari was a Member of Technical Staff in the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs from 1996-2003 and was an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan from 2004-2007. Her research interests include information theory and data compression. She was an Associate Editor for Source Coding for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 2002-2005. She was the Bell Labs representative to the DIMACS council from 2001-2003 and has been a member of the program committees for many conferences and workshops.Host: Gerhard Kramer, gkramer@usc.edu, EEB 536, x07229

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos