Part of the success of the two theories can be attributed to a clean separation of the computing elements from the communicating elements. Today, however, communication and computing are coming ever closer together, often leaving the human out of the loop. This merger is posing new challenges, definitional and algorithmic, to the theory of communication. In this talk I will describe some of the concrete challenges that we have looked at. I will also describe our attempts at modelling these problems and, in some cases, describe some preliminary solutions.
Bio:
Madhu Sudan received his Bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at New Delhi in 1987 and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992. From 1992-1997 he was a Research Staff Member at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. In 1997, he moved to MIT where he is now the Fujitsu Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and an Associate Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2003-2004, and a Guggenheim Fellow from 2005-2006. Madhu Sudan's research interests include computational complexity theory, algorithms and coding theory. He is best known for his works on probabilistic checking of proofs, and on the design of list-decoding algorithms for error-correcting codes. In 2002 Madhu Sudan was awarded the Nevanlinna Prize, for outstanding contributions to the mathematics of computer science, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing. Madhu Sudan's other awards include the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award (1992), the IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award (2000) and the Godel Prize (2001), Distinguished Alumnus Award of the University of California at Berkeley (2003), and Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology at Delhi (2004).
Refreshments will be provided at 10:45