2008 Shannon Memorial Lecture: Information Theory and Minimum Mean-Square Estimation

Guest Speaker: Sergio Verdú, Princeton University Professor, School of Engineering and Applied Science Date: April 30th, 2008 Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm Location: Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall, UCSD [webcast] Host: Jack Wolf, Alon Orlitsky, Ramesh Rao

DESCRIPTION/ABSTRACT: Noted information theorist Sergio Verdu of Princeton will deliver the 2008 Shannon Memorial Lecture in honor of the late Claude Shannon, the founding father of information theory. The series is organized by Jack Wolf of the Center for Magnetic Recording Research at UCSD, with support from the UCSD division of Calit2 and its Center for Information Theory and Applications (ITA). This is the sixth annual Shannon Memorial Lecture at UC San Diego. SPEAKER BIO: Sergio Verdú has been on the Faculty of Princeton University since 1984. He teaches and conducts research in the Department of Electrical Engineering of the School of Engineering and Applied Science.  A member of the Information Sciences and Systems group and the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, his research interests are in Information Theory, Data Compression and Transmission, and Signal Processing. A native of Barcelona, Spain, Sergio Verdú received the Telecommunications Engineering degree from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain, in 1980 and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984. Conducted at the Coordinated Science Laboratory of the University of Illinois, his doctoral research pioneered the field of Multiuser Detection. Sergio Verdú was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 1992 and member of the U. S. National Academy of Engineering in 2007. He received the 2000 Frederick E. Terman Award from the American Society for Engineering Education, and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000. In 2005, he received a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. He is the recipient of the 2007 Claude E. Shannon Award, and the 2008 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal. In 1998, Cambridge University Press published his book Multiuser Detection.  His papers have received several awards: the 1992 IEEE Donald Fink Paper Award, the 1998 Information Theory Outstanding Paper Award, a IEEE Information Theory Golden Jubilee Paper Award, the 2000 Paper Award from the Japan Telecommunications Advancement Foundation, the 2002 Leonard G. Abraham Prize Award in the field of Communications Systems and the 2007 IEEE Joint Communications/Information Theory Paper Award. Sergio Verdú has served as Associate Editor of the IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control, and as Associate Editor for Shannon Theory of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.  He served as President of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 1997.  He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory. He has held visiting appointments at the Australian National University, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and the University of Tokyo. In 1998 he was Visiting Professor at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2002 he held the Hewlett-Packard Visiting Research Professorship at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Telefónica I+D. MORE INFORMATION: Pre-lecture reception at CMRR Lobby from 2:30-3:30pm.