Event
ISR Distinguished Lecturer/ECE BAH Colloquium: Sergio Verdu, "The Year of Shannon"
Friday, May 6, 2016
3:00 p.m.
1110 Kim Engineering Building (Stanley Zupnik Hall)
ISR Distinguished Lecturer Series
ECE Distinguished Colloquium sponsored by Booz | Allen | Hamilton
"The Year of Shannon"
Sergio Verdu
Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering
Princeton University
Abstract
One of the key scientific contributions of the 20th century, Claude Shannon's "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" created the field of information theory in 1948. This non-technical talk, scheduled one week after the 100th anniversary of his birth, will give a biographical account of Claude Shannon's life.
Biography
Sergio Verdú is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University where he teaches and conducts research on information theory in the Information Sciences and Systems Group. He is also a core member of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics.
A native of Barcelona, Spain, Sergio Verdú received the Telecommunications Engineering degree from the Universitat Politecnica de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, in 1980 and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984. Conducted at the Coordinated Science Laboratory of the University of Illinois, his doctoral research pioneered the field of Multiuser Detection. His current research focuses on the information theoretic fundamental limits of information transmission and compression.
Sergio Verdú was elected member of the U. S. National Academy of Engineering in 2007. He is the recipient of the 2007 Claude E. Shannon Award (the highest award in information theory), and the 2008 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal. He received the 2000 Frederick E. Terman Award from the American Society for Engineering Education, and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000. In 2005, he received a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 1992.
In 1998, Cambridge University Press published his book "Multiuser Detection.'' His papers have received several awards: the 1992 IEEE Donald Fink Paper Award, the Information Theory Outstanding Paper Award in both 1998 and 2011, an IEEE Information Theory Golden Jubilee Paper Award, the 2000 Paper Award from the Japan Telecommunications Advancement Foundation, the 2002 Leonard G. Abraham Prize Award in the field of Communications Systems, the 2007 IEEE Joint Communications/Information Theory Paper Award, and the 2009 Stephen O. Rice Prize from the IEEE Communications Society.
Sergio Verdú served as President of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 1997. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory. He has also served in various editorial capacities for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory: Associate Editor (Shannon Theory, 1990-1993; Book Reviews, 2002-2006), Guest Editor of the Special Fiftieth Anniversary Commemorative Issue (published by IEEE Press as "Information Theory: Fifty years of discovery"), and currently a member of the Executive Editorial Board.
He has held visiting appointments at the Australian National University, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and the University of Tokyo. In 1998 he was Visiting Professor at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2002 he held the Hewlett-Packard Visiting Research Professorship at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley. He gave the 28th Shannon Lecture of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 2007, the Sixth Shannon Memorial Lecture at UCSD in 2008, the Inaugural Nyquist Distinguished Lecture at Yale in 2010, and the Tenth Viterbi Lecture at USC in 2012.