Short Course on Elements of Network Information Theory

                        Course Information

                          Detailed Course Outline (a 3 day-4 hours/day course )

Part 1: Introduction and motivation

•  The big picture ( Shannon 's Information Theory vs. Network Information Theory)

•  Distributed signal processing and communications (change of paradigm)

•  Wireless sensor and ad-hoc networks (emerging systems)

•  Review of several key concepts of Information Theory

•  Reading material and exercises

Part 2: Distributed lossless compression of correlated discrete sources

•  Concept of random binning

•  Slepian-Wolf Theorem: Achievability and converse

•  Intuition from Information Theory towards building distributed source codes

•  Practical code constructions: asymmetric and symmetric coding

•  Applications: network correlated data gathering and noiseless broadcast channel

Part 3: Distributed lossy compression of correlated continuous sources

•  Asymmetric coding, Wyner-Ziv theorem and extensions

•  Constructions based on nested lattices and nested trellis codes

•  Various applications

Part 4: Multiple-access channels (MAC)

•  MAC capacity region (achievability and converse)

•  Convexity and examples

•  Capacity region for Gaussian multiple-access channels

•  M-user multiple access channels

•  Duality between Slepian-Wolf and MAC

Part 5: Channels with state information

•  Non-causal state information at encoder (Gelfand-Pinsker problem)

•  Writing on dirty paper (Costa problem)

•  (Mathematical and operational) duality with Wyner-Ziv problem

•  Multi-antenna Gaussian broadcast channel

Baltasar Beferull-Lozano was born in Valencia , Spain , in 1972. He received his MSc in Physics from Universidad de Valencia (UV), Valencia , Spain , in 1995 (First in Class Honors) and the MSc and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles , in 1999 and 2002, respectively. His PhD work was supported by a National Graduate Doctoral Fellowship from the Ministry of Education of Spain .

From January 1996 to August 1997, he was a Research Fellow Assistant at the Department of Electronics and Computer Science, Universidad de Valencia, and from September 1997 to September 2002, he was a Research Fellow Assistant in the Department of Electrical Engineering, the NSF Research Integrated Media Systems Center and the Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI), at USC. He has also worked for AT&T Shannon Laboratories. From October 2002 to June 2005, he was a Research Associate in the Department of Communication Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-EPFL, Switzerland , and a Senior Researcher within the Swiss National Competence Center in Research on Mobile Information and Communication Systems. From July 2005 to November 2005, he was a Visiting Professor at Universidad de Valencia and Universidad Politecnica de Valencia. Since December 2005, he is a Research Professor in Instituto de Robotica-Escuela Tecnica Superior de Ingenieria at Universidad de Valencia, where he is the Head of the Group of Information and Communication Systems. Dr. Beferull-Lozano has co-authored over 40 technical publications, including 12 (IEEE/ACM Trans.) journal papers and more than 30 international conference papers, and holds 2 U.S. patents. He has served as a member of the Technical Program Committees for several ACM & IEEE International Conferences. His research interests are in the general areas of signal and image processing, distributed signal processing and communications for wireless networks, information theory and communication theory.

At USC, Dr. Beferull-Lozano received several awards including the Best PhD Thesis paper Award in April 2002 and the Outstanding Academic Achievement Awards in April 1999 and April 2002.

He has also received recently the IDEA Award (Section of Technologies) from the Spanish Government, which recognizes outstanding young researchers within Spain .