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6th Annual Shannon Memorial Lecture
Reception: 2:30pm at the Center for Magnetic Recording Research Lecture: 4:00pm at the Calit2 auditorium
Speaker: Professor Sergio Verdu from Princeton University
Title: Information theory and Minimum Mean-Square Estimation
Abstract:In this talk Prof. Sergio will survey his work on the interactions between information theory and
estimation theory. In particular, he will show how to express any information measure as a function of
the minimum mean-square error achievable when observing a random variable in Gaussian noise.
These relationships lead to surprising applications, including a new universal relationship in
continuous-time nonlinear filtering, the optimization of the input power spectrum in DSL lines, and the
simplest proof of the entropy-power inequality
Biography: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.
CMRR Seminar: April 29, 2008, at 4:00pm, CMRR Auditorium
Speaker: Jordan A. Katine
Title: Materials and Processing Techniques in Magnetic Nanofabrication
Abstract: The ability to fabricate nanoscale devices has opened up exciting new areas of research in magnetism such as the spin torque effect. Unfortunately for scientists interested in this field, there is a scarcity of publications that explain how these nanoscale magnetic devices are built. In this talk, I will present an overview of magnetic device nanofabrication, using specific examples such as current-perpendicular-to-the-plane (CPP) GMR nanopillars, to highlight the techniques that are used to create these structures.
Biography: Jordan Katine received his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University where he researched quantum interference phenomena in GaAs/AlGaAs quantum dots. He moved to Cornell for post-doctoral work in Bob Buhrman’s laboratory, where he studied electronic transport in nanostructured magnetic multilayer devices, which included measurements of the spin torque effect. In 1999 Jordan moved to the IBM Almaden Research Center. Since moving to IBM, and subsequently to Hitachi, Jordan has continued his research in nanoscale devices, including magnetic recording heads.
April 23-24, 2008
CMRR Spring Research Review The Spring CMRR Research Review as been scheduled for April 23-24, 2008. Attendance is limited to CMRR sponsors and invited guests. For more information, please contact Iris Villanueva, phone (858)534-6196. Registration information
April 10, 2008
CMRR Seminar: April 10, 2008 at 4:00pm, CMRR Auditorium
Speaker: Warren Gross, McGill University
Title: Stochastic Decoding of LDPC Codes
Abstract: Stochastic decoding is a new approach to iterative decoding of error-correcting codes. Stochastic decoding of practical Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes has recently been shown to be able to provide near-optimal decoding performance with respect to the Sum-Product Algorithm. In this approach, information is represented by the statistics of bit streams, resulting in simple, high-speed hardware implementation of graph-based decoding algorithms. This talk provides a survey of stochastic methods for graph-based iterative decoding and the state-of-the-art in stochastic decoder hardware implementations.
Biography: Warren J. Gross is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University. His research interests are in the design and application of signal processing microsystems and custom computer architectures. He received the PhD degree from the University of Toronto in 2003. In the summers of 2004 and 2005, he was a Visiting Professor at the Université de Bretagne-Sud. Lorient, France. He served as the General Chair of the 6th Analog Decoding Workshop. He is a member of the Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and served on the program committees of the IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems, the IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines and the International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications. Dr. Gross is a member of the IEEE and a licensed Professional Engineer in the Province of Ontario.
April 1, 2008
CMRR Seminar: April 1, 2008 at 4:00pm, CMRR Auditorium
Speaker: Thomas M. Coughlin
Title: Storing Your Life: Consumer Digital Storage - Personal, Hierarchical and Virtual
Abstract: This presentation discusses different mobile and static usage models for digital storage in consumer devices. These models define storage hierarchies that are useful for analyzing the proper digital storage technology for a consumer electronics application. Important characteristics of consumer storage devices are shown and guidelines are given for how digital storage should be designed in consumer devices. Demand for higher resolution content and for capturing ever greater details of the life of family members will drive increases in commercial as well as personal content storage demand. Sharing of content within a home or over the Internet creates much greater demand for storage since a shared file can be multiplied many times through network sharing. Ultimately this content must be indexed, protected, managed and the physical complexity of the storage devices must be hidden to the user by home storage virtualization
Biography: Dr. Coughlin is the Founder and President of Coughlin Associates. Tom has over 30 years of experience in the data storage industry as a working engineer and high level technical manager. In addition to regular technical and management consulting projects he is the publisher of reports on digital storage in consumer electronics as a content creation and distribution. He is the author of the recently published Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics: The Essential Guide from Newnes (a division of Elsevier). Tom has many published reports and articles on digital storage and its applications. He has 6 patents on magnetic recording and related technologies. Tom is the founder and organizer of the annual Storage Visions Conference, a partner to the International CES. Tom is a senior member and was 2007 chairman of the Santa Clara Valley IEEE Section and San Francisco Bay Area Council and was chairman of the Santa Clara Valley IEEE Consumer Electronics Society in 2006 and past chairman of the SCV IEEE Magnetics Society more than once. Tom is a member of the IEEE CE Society Adcom. He is also a member of APS, AVS, IDEMA, SNIA, AAAS, TCG and SMPTE.
Tom received a B.S. in Physics and an M.S.E.E. from the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis) and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Shinshu University in Nagano, Japan
Sungho Jin, Distinguished Professor of Materials Science, has been selected as Fellow of the MRS (Materials Research Society) for pioneering research on magnetic, superconducting, environmental, nano and bio materials, and for significant publications, patents and industrial applications. The title of MRS Fellow honors scientists who are notable for their distinguished research accomplishments and their outstanding contributions to the advancement of materials research, world-wide. The inaugural class of Fellows will be recognized at the 2008 MRS Spring Meeting, March 24-28, in San Francisco.
CMRR Seminar: February 27, 2008 at 4:00pm, CMRR Auditorium
Speaker: Zsigmond Nagy
Title: Efficient Coding and a Capacity Lower Bound for the Square-1 Constraint
Abstract:
Binary constrained codes in 1 and 2 dimensions are used in magnetic and optical recording devices and have been studied extensively. A key property associated with each constraint is its capacity, which is an asymptotically tight upper bound on the average number of information bits that can be stored per position by any code that satisfies the constraint.
Since the capacity of 2-dimensional constraints is not known in general, it is of great interest to calculate numerical capacity upper and lower bounds for 2-dimensional constraints. Furthermore, efficient encoding algorithms that achieve an encoding rate close to the capacity are important in practical applications. We present a new bit stuffing-type encoder for the binary Square-1 constraint (no two 1s appear on neighboring positions horizontally, vertically, or diagonally in the 2-dimensional plane), and show that its encoding rate is R=0.415681, which improves on the previously known capacity lower bounds for the Square-1 constraint.
CMRR Seminar: February 19, 2008, at 4:00pm, CMRR Auditorium
Speaker: Kannan M. Krishnan – University of Washington
Title: Spins, Bytes and Cures: Materials, Devices and Biomedical Nanomagnetics
Abstract: There is a resurgence of interest in magnetic materials on the nanometer length scale largely driven by new synthesis and characterization capabilities as well as potential applications in information storage, spintronics and biomedical applications. Size-dependent scaling laws, exchange, proximity and interface effects and studies of spin transport are increasingly of fundamental and technological interest.
Following a brief outlook on nanotechnology and an overview [1] of our research, I will present highlights of our work in dilute magnetic semiconductors [2,3] and exchange-biased thin film heterostructures [4,5]. The rest of the talk will focus on biomedical nanomagnetics using functionalized nanoparticles emphasizing their synthesis [6,7,8], morphology [9,10], surface functionalization [11,12] self-organization [13], inter-particle interactions [14], cytotoxicity and biomedical applications [15,16] including therapy, imaging and diagnostics.
Our work is supported by NSF/dmr, NSF/ecs, NSF/imr, NIH/ninds, DoE/bes and the Campbell, Murdock and Guggenheim Foundations
January 2008
CMRR Seminar - January 8, 2008, at 4:00pm, CMRR Auditorium.
Speaker: Dr. Ori Shental
Title: Gaussian Belief Propagation for Solving Systems of Linear Equations: Theory and Application
Abstract: The canonical linear-algebraic problem of solving a system of linear equations arises in numerous contexts in the mathematical sciences and engineering. In this talk, we introduce an efficient Gaussian belief propagation (GaBP) solver that does not involve direct matrix inversion. The iterative nature of our approach allows for a distributed message-passing implementation of the solution algorithm. We discuss the properties of the GaBP solver, including convergence, exactness, computational complexity, message-passing efficiency and its relation to classical solution methods. The attractiveness of the proposed solver, in comparison to conventional iterative solution methods, is demonstrated using numerical examples and applications, like linear detection.
The talk is based on a joint work with Prof. Jack K. Wolf, Prof. Paul H. Siegel, Prof. Danny Dolev (HUJI) and Mr. Danny Bickson (HUJI)
2007
CMRR Spring Research Review - November 2007. The Spring CMRR Research Review as been scheduled for April 23-24, 2008. Attendance is limited to CMRR sponsors and invited guests. For more information, please contact Iris Villanueva, phone (858)534-6196.
Paul H. Siegel, - On August 21, 2007 a reception was held at CMRR in honor of CMRR Director Paul H. Siegel who was awarded an Endowed Professorship at UCSD. Among the many guests were Paul’s wife, Darcy, son Oren and daughter Micah.
Frieder Sieble, Dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering, began the proceedings by explaining what a great honor it is to be awarded an endowed chair at UCSD. He also spoke of Paul’s many achievements in research, teaching and service. The program continued with remarks by Larry Larson (ECE Chairman), Eric Fullerton, Larry Milstein, Jack Wolf, Gordon Hughes, Ami Berkowitz, James Lemke (founder of CMRR), and former students Joseph Soriaga and Jilei Hou. Professor Wolf also read a congratulatory letter from Neal Bertram who could not attend. Paul Siegel ended the formal proceedings with a heart warming “thank you.”
Jack Keil Wolf, the Stephen O. Rice Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCSD and CMRR Endowed Chair has been selected to receive the 2007 Aaron Wyner Distinguished Service Award from the Information Theory (IT) Society. This award recognizes his many years of inspiring leadership and service to the IT Society.
Frank Talke, an Endowed Chaired Professor at CMRR has been awarded the Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This award is one of the most prestigious awards in German academia and based primarily on the scientist's/scholar's entire academic record. In addition, awardees are invited to conduct an original research project of their own design in close collaboration with colleagues in Germany over a period of six to twelve months.
