TITLE: On Two-Terminal Source Coding
ABSTRACT: Two-terminal source coding appears in the literature in a sequence of papers going back to the 1970s, including Slepian-Wolf, Wyner, Ahlswede, Berger-Yeung, and Berger-Tung. For each instance of the problem, a single-letter information-theoretic statement of the achievable rate region is sought. The Berger-Tung case, consisting of the compression of two decentralized sources has remained open, as have others. To better motivate the subject, the talk begins with some personal experiences leading to my interest in this problem. Then, a general formulation of two-terminal source coding, including all combinations of data compaction and data compression is developed. The general solution is given and specialized to each of the individual instances of the problem simply by applying the appropriate constraints defining that instance. Generalization to more than two terminals follows.
BIOGRAPHY: Richard E. Blahut was Professor of ECE at the University of Illinois from 1994 to 2014 and Head of that Department from 2001 to 2008. He is now at the University of Pennsylvania as an Adjunct Professor. Professor Blahut’s own research pertains to coding theory and algo-rithms for signal processing and image formation. While at IBM, he pioneered passive coherent location systems, which are used for U.S. Department of Defense surveillance systems. He also established error-control codes that have been used in the high-speed telecommunications systems for military helicopters and long-range cruise missiles. That research resulted in his first textbook, Theory and Practice of Error Control Codes (Addison-Wesley), which was published in 1983, while he was simultaneously teaching as a courtesy professor at nearby Cornell Univer-sity, his doctoral alma mater. Over the ensuring decades, he has continued to publish prolifically. His 11th book is entitled Cryptography and Secure Communication.
