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 |
Keynote: Decoding the Information in Genomes and Protein Networks
Richard Karp, UC Berkeley Length: 51:13 [video] |
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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]
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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] |
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OPEN
PROBLEMS |
Chair: Alexander Vardy, UCSD
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Distortion Region in Common Source Broadcasting
Giuseppe Caire University of Southern California Length: 8:31 [video] |
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Pointwise Convergence of Densities of Information Projections
Peter Harremoes University of Copenhagen (Denmark) Length: 11:46 [video] |
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Does Decode-and-Forward Achieve Capacity When the Relay is Near the Source?
Gerhard Kramer, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies Length: 6:52 [video] |
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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] |
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Degrees of Freedom in MIMO Broadcast with Finite Precision CSI
Shlomo Shamai, Technion (Israel) Length: 7:28 [video] |
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Network Multicast: A Mathematical Model
Emina Soljanin Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies Length: 10:12 [video] |
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THURSDAY
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FEBRUARY 9, 2006
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TUTORIALS
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LIFE SCIENCES
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Systems Biology
Bernhard Palsson, Professor of Bioengineering UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering Length: 42:00 [video] |
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Combinatorial Problems in Computational Biology
Pavel Pevzner, Prof, Computer Science and Engineering UCSD Jacbos School of Engineering Length: 48:00 [video] |
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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