Tutorials and Inaugural Ceremony from Information Theory and Applications Workshop

By Doug Ramsey

San Diego, CA, February 12, 2006 -- The life sciences took center stage last week as the UCSD Division of Calit2 hosted the inaugural workshop of its new Information Theory and Applications (ITA) Center. While information theory has traditionally been associated with coding for communications and storage, the number of talks about applications of information theory in computational biology and related fields indicated the theory's growing acceptance among life-science researchers. The keynote address by UC Berkeley's Richard Karp focused on how to decode the information in genomes and protein networks, and three Calit2-affiliated faculty at UCSD -- Pavel Pevzner, Bernhard Palsson and Nicolas Schork -- offered tutorials on systems biology, applied population genetics, and combinatorial problems in computational biology.

The 5-day workshop included the inaugural ceremony for the ITA Center on Wednesday, Feb. 8. That ceremony is now available for on-demand viewing, along with the life science talks mentioned above, and eleven short talks on open questions in information theory. [To read the news release about the new ITA Center, click here .]

Select presentations from the workshop are now available below from Calit2's Multimedia archives [Real  player required].

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 8, 2006
Karp
Keynote: Decoding the Information in Genomes and Protein Networks
Richard Karp, UC Berkeley
Length: 51:13 [video]
Panel
Panel Discussion: Robert Calderbank, Princeton; David Forney, MIT; Michael Luby, Digital Fountain; Pavel Pevzner, UCSD; Martin Vetterli, EPFL; Andrew Viterbi; Jacob Ziv, Technion. Length: 1:06:19 [video]
Jacobs
Inaugural Ceremony: ITA Center
QUALCOMM Founder Irwin Jacobs; Alon Orlitsky, ITA Director; Calit2's Larry Smarr and Ramesh Rao; Jack Wolf (moderator).
Length: 57:18 [video]
OPEN
PROBLEMS
Chair: Alexander Vardy, UCSD
Caire
Distortion Region in Common Source Broadcasting 
Giuseppe Caire
University of Southern California
Length: 8:31 [video]
Harremoes
Pointwise Convergence of Densities of Information Projections 
Peter Harremoes
University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
Length: 11:46 [video]
Kramer
Does Decode-and-Forward Achieve Capacity When the Relay is Near the Source?
Gerhard Kramer, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies
Length: 6:52 [video]
Kashyap
Analyzing the Performance of the Simplex Algorithm in Connection with ML Decoding via Linear Programming
Navin Kashyap, Queen's University at Kingston (Canada)
Length: 10:07 [video]
Lapidoth
Degrees of Freedom in MIMO Broadcast with Finite Precision CSI
Shlomo Shamai, Technion (Israel)
Length: 7:28 [video]
Laroia
Mobile Wireless Broadcast Channel 
Rajiv Laroia
Founder and CTO, Flarion
Length: 12:59 [video]
McEliece
Girth Doesn't Matter (or Does It?) 
Robert McEliece
Caltech
Length: 10:33 [video]
Soljanin
Network Multicast: A Mathematical Model
Emina Soljanin
Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies
Length: 10:12 [video]
Viswanathan
Size of the Underlying Alphabet
Krishnamurthy Viswanathan
HP Labs
Length: 8:55 [video]
Vontobel
Finding the Best Representation of a Code
Pascal Vontobel
MIT
Length: 11:30 [video]
Wu
Network Arithmetic 
Yunnan Wu
Microsoft Research
Length: 7:36 [video]
THURSDAY      
FEBRUARY 9, 2006
 
TUTORIALS
 
LIFE SCIENCES
palsson
Systems Biology 
Bernhard Palsson, Professor of Bioengineering
UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering
Length: 42:00 [video]
Pevzner
Combinatorial Problems in Computational Biology
Pavel Pevzner, Prof, Computer Science and Engineering
UCSD Jacbos School of Engineering
Length: 48:00 [video]
Schork
Applied Population Genetics 
Nicholas Schork, Professor of Psychiatry
UCSD School of Medicine
Length: 57:07 [video]

For more information on the ITA Center inaugural workshop, go to http://ita.ucsd.edu/

Related Links
Information Theory and Applications Center
ITA Center News Release
ITA Workshop Photo Gallery