computational aspects of communication

02/02/2017 - 12:00

Communication has played a growing role in our lives over the past decade. It often becomes a bottleneck in the performance of our daily tasks. This motivates the pursuit for more efficient communication. However, efficiency is becoming more challenging from the computational aspect, due to several of its characteristics in modern communications.

One such characteristic is the interactivity of the protocols in today's noisy communication environments. One natural approach to overcome such a challenge is called Interactive Coding. Interactive coding is an efficient black-box mechanism to convert any interactive protocol that performs well under noiseless environment into one that is also resilient to errors, while preserving the efficiency of the protocol.

Another characteristic which challenges today’s communications is the dynamic and interactive nature of modern protocols. This may lead to desynchronization between the communicating parties. However, until now, almost all designed systems assume that both parties are perfectly synchronized and all context is shared perfectly by the communicating agents. Thus, any violation of those protocols leads to a breakdown in communication.

This talk will address both of the aforementioned challenges.The first part of the talk will be devoted to interactive coding and in the second part, we will  focus on designing protocols under uncertainty of the shared context.