Abstract

In this talk, I will present a bounding technique that has been developed through a series of recent works. This technique has led to state-of-the-art converse bounds for two long-standing open problems in the field of Information Theory. The first problem involves determining the fundamental limits of channels with sub-optimal decoding, commonly referred to as “mismatched decoding”. This problem has diverse applications across various domains, including communications, Information Theory, and computer science, As an example, the zero-error capacity can be regrded as a special case of a channel with mismatched decoding. The second problem pertains to the establishment of a single-letter formula for the reliability function, also known as the error exponent, of discrete memoryless channels.

Bio: Anelia Somekh-Baruch, received her B.Sc. from Tel-Aviv University in 1996 and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in 1999 and 2003, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. During the period 2004-2009 she held visiting Research Associate appointments with the Electrical Engineering Departments of Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and the Technion. In 2009 she joined the Faculty of Engineering of Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, where she is currently an Associate Professor. Since Oct. 2021 she has been an Associate Editor for the Transactions on Information Theory. Her research interests include topics in information theory, in particular Shannon theory and channel coding, and topics in communication theory. She received the Tel-Aviv University program for outstanding B.Sc. students scholarship, the Viterbi scholarship, the Rothschild Foundation scholarship for postdoctoral studies, and the Marie Curie Outgoing International Fellowship.