Topic：Channel Capacity from Waves to Particles

Speaker：Prof. Richard E. Blahut

Time：9:00 AM, December 8

Venue：F708, New Main Building

Abstract：

The telecommunication system that now girds the planet with fibers and waves has changed society in ways that could not be imagined one hundred years ago. I will begin with the highlights of this story, then transition to a discussion of information theory. Within information theory, a wave channel and a particle channel are treated as two distinct examples of channels. Within physics, an electromagnetic wave has a granular structure which only becomes evident at low signal levels. Quantum theory reconciles the physics. However, we will show that the Poisson transform reconciles the matter at the level of the information theory, showing that the channel capacity of the classical additive gaussian noise channel is emergent from the capacity of an appropriately defined particle channel.

Biography of the Speaker：

Richard E. Blahut is the Emeritus Henrik Magnuski Professor and former Head of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois, and an Adjunct Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an IBM Emeritus Fellow, a Fellow of the IEEE, and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. He is a recipient of the Information Theory Society Claude Shannon Award and the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal. He is the author of ten textbooks in the general area of informatics.

School of Electronic and Information Engineering