The ISITA2008 committee is proud to be able to announce that we have secured three distinguished guest speakers for the Symposium. They will present their talks in a plenary session on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 9 under the umbrella theme of Networks - Practice and Theory.
The Internet: where did it come from, why did it succeed?
Brian Carpenter, The University of Auckland
For most people, even in the technical and scientific community, the Internet seemed to appear out of nowhere in about 1995. Since then, it has revolutionised the way that hundreds of millions of people get news and information, stay in touch with family, structure their social life, entertain themselves, or do their jobs. How did this happen? Was it an accident or a plan? This talk will present a historical analysis of the development of the Internet with particular emphasis on the principles of engineering that led to its success. The origins of the Internet can be traced back to the early 1960s, and continuous growth has occurred over almost 40 years. A consistent set of software and systems engineering principles has emerged as a result.
Brian Carpenter has accompanied the Internet from its creation right to the pervasise global network it is today. Trained as a physicist, he also holds a PhD in Computer Science and is a Chartered Engineer (UK). At CERN, he spent ten years developing process control software, interrupted by a three-year stint at Massey University in New Zealand, teaching Computer Science. He later became head of CERN's networking group, working among others with Tim Berners-Lee, the "Father of the WWW". Since then, work on Internet technologies and standards has been the mainstay of his career, which he continued to pursue as a Distinguished Engineer at IBM for many years before joining the University of Auckland as a Senior Researcher in 2007. Among others, he served on the Internet Architecture Board and chaired the Internet Society's Board of Trustees and the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF) for two years each, contributing significantly to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and work on differentiated services.
This session will be followed by a 20-minute break.
Network Coding for Error Correction and Security
Raymond W. Yeung, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Network coding, a relatively new concept in network communications, is generating much interest in information theory, coding theory, networking, wireless communications, cryptography, and computer science. Consider a point-to-point communication network on which a number of information sources are to be multicast to certain sets of destination nodes. The problem is to characterize the maximum possible throughputs. Contrary to one's intuition, network coding theory reveals that it is in general not optimal to regard the information to be multicast as a "fluid" which can simply be routed or replicated. Rather, by employing coding at the nodes, bandwidth can in general be saved. In this talk, we will give an overview of network coding and its applications to error correction and information security. In particular, network generalizations of classical algebraic coding theory will be discussed.
Raymond W. Yeung received his B.S., M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Cornell University in 1984, 1985, and 1988, respectively, spending time at ENST during 1986. From 1988 to 1991, he was a member of the technical staff at AT\&T Bell Labs. Since 1991, he has been with the Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he is now a chair professor. He is the author of the textbooks A First Course in Information Theory and its revision Information Theory and Network Coding. He has held visiting positions at Cornell University, Nankai University, the University of Bielefeld, the University of Copenhagen, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Munich University of Technology. His research interests include information theory and network coding. He has been a consultant for JPL Pasadena in a project to salvage the malfunctioning Galileo spacecraft and a consultant for NEC USA. Dr. Yeung was a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society from 1999 to 2001 and has served on the committees of a number of information theory symposiums and workshops. He was General Chair of the First and the Fourth Workshops on Network, Coding, and Applications (NetCod 2005 and 2008), Technical Co-Chair for the 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory and the 2006 IEEE Information Theory Workshop, Chengdu, China. He currently serves as an editor-at-large of Communications in Information and Systems, an editor of Foundation and Trends in Communications and Information Theory and Foundation and Trends in Networking, and was an Associate Editor for Shannon Theory of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 2003 to 2005. He was a recipient of the Croucher Foundation Senior Research Fellowship for 2000/2001, the Best Paper Award (Communication Theory) of the 2004 International Conference on Communications, Circuits and System (with C. K. Ngai), the 2005 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award (with S.-Y.~R.~Li and N.~Cai), and the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2007. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers.
This session will be followed by a 10-minute break.
Network Coding with Multicast of Correlated Multi-Source to Multi-Sink
Te Sun Han, Waseda University
The problem of network coding with multicast of single source to multi-sink has first been studied by Ahlswede and et. al. in 2000, where they established the celebrated the maxflow-mincut theorem on information flow in a network of independent channels. On the other hand, in 1980, Han has studied the case with correlated multisource and a single sink from the polymatroidal point of view. This talk tries to show a fundamental theorem to unify both.
Te Sun Han received his B.Eng., M.Eng., and D.Eng. degrees in mathematical engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1964, 1966, and 1971, respectively. From 1972 to 1975 he worked there as a research associate. From 1975 to 1983, he was an associate professor at Department of Information Sciences, Sagami Institute of Technology in Fujisawa. He was a visiting professor at the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Bielefeld, Germany, in 1980 and a visiting fellow at the Laboratory of Information Systems at Stanford in 1981 (summer). From 1983 to 1985, he was a professor at the Mathematics Department of Toho University in Chiba, and from 1985 to 1993 at the Department of Information Systems of Senshu University in Kawasaki. Since 1993 (April), he has been a professor at the Graduate School of Information Systems of the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo. From 1990 to 1991, he was a visiting fellow at the Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton and at the School of Electrical Engineering at Cornell. In 1994, he was a visiting fellow at the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Bielefeld. From 1978 to 1990, he was engaged in organizing activities on the Board of Governers of SITA. He was a member of the program committeee of the 1988 IEEE ISIT in Kobe, a session organizer of 1990 IEEE ITW in Veldhoven, and a member of the organizing committee of 1993 IEEE ITW in Gotemba, Japan, and co-chair of the 4th Benelux-Japan Workshop on Information Theory and Communication in 1994. From 1994 to 1996, he chaired the Tokyo Chapter of the IEEE Information Theory Society. Since 1994, has been an associate editor for Shannon Theory for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society. His research interests include basic problems in Shannon Theory, multi-user source/channel coding systems, multiterminal hypothesis-testing and parameter estimation under data compression, large-deviation approach to information-theoretic problems, and geometric structure of information systems.