On the Sufficiency of Ignorance: Recent Lessons from Information Theory

Information theory has a long history of providing important architectural insights on the design of efficient communication systems. Frequently, these insights have arisen from uncovering when certain kinds of system constraints do *not* incur a cost in the performance metric of interest. This tradition is alive and well, with many such insights from the community over the past decade or more now influencing the design of several emerging systems. Today, there continues to be much work seeking to uncover additional instances of such phenomena that may prove important in tomorrow's systems. In this talk, I will describe three diverse but representative examples from our own efforts. In particular, I will discuss the information embedding problem and its companion problem of bit-stealing, the problem of compression with distortion side information, and the rateless coding problem.

Based on a variety of joint works with subsets of Brian Chen, Aaron Cohen, Stark Draper, Uri Erez, Emin Martinian, Mitchell Trott, and Ram
Zamir.

Greg Wornell has been on the MIT faculty since 1991, where he is Professor in the EECS department. He did his graduate work also at MIT in EECS, and his undergraduate work at the University of British Columbia. His research interests span a variety of aspects of signal processing, information theory, and digital communication, and include algorithms and architectures for wireless and sensor networks, broadband systems, and multimedia environments.