Sub-additivity of functionals and non-convex optimization in Information Theory

Friday, April 13, 2018 - 4:00pm to Saturday, April 14, 2018 - 4:55pm

Event Calendar Category

Other LIDS Events

Speaker Name

Chandra Nair

Affiliation

Department of Information Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Building and Room Number

32-D677

Abstract

Rate regions in network information theory have often been characterized using auxiliary random variables. In recent past, optimality or sub-optimality of some fundamental rate regions have been established by computing the optimal extremal auxiliaries, i.e. by computing the optimizers of a family of non-convex optimization problems. These results and computations seem to reveal an intriguing relationship between local tensorization and global tensorization. Indeed several of the counterexamples to various optimality questions have been deduced based on the above intuitive connection. In this talk, I will try to outline these observations, and formally state various observations as open problems. I will also talk about a potential pathway (verified on small examples by simulations) that supports this connection as well as potential consequences.

Biography

Chandra Nair's research interests and contributions have been in developing ideas, tools, and techniques to tackle families of combinatorial and non-convex optimization problems arising primarily in the information sciences. His recent research focus has been on studying the optimality of certain inner and outer bounds to capacity regions for fundamental problems in multiuser information theory. He received the 2016 Information Theory Society paper award for developing a novel way to establish optimality of Gaussian distributions.

Chandra Nair got his Bachelor's degree from IIT Madras (India) where he was the Philips (India) and Siemens (India) award winner for the best academic performance; and his master's and Ph.D. from Stanford, where he was a Stanford graduate fellow (00-04) and a Microsoft graduate fellow (04-05). He is a fellow of IEEE and is currently a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Information theory society.

Chandra Nair is an Associate Professor with the Information Engineering department at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he also serves as the Programme Director of the undergraduate program on Mathematics and Information Engineering and as the Director of the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science and Communications.