Dr. Alexandros Dimakis of University of Texas at Austin

Smartphone and tablet proliferation is generating an enormous increase in the demand for multimedia content. Modern wireless networks cannot support this demand and its large projected growth. We explain how caching of popular content can play a fundamental role in addressing this problem and how several novel mathematical and algorithmic problems arise.

We focus on the Femtocaching problem and the Coded Caching problem introduced by Maddah-Ali and Niesen and discuss how caching is very promising for giving gains that scale surprisingly well in the size of the wireless system. Unfortunately, we show that for these gains to appear, the cached files must be separated in a number of blocks that scales exponentially in the number of users and files. We show how this can problem can be resolved if we modify the Maddah-Ali and Niesen scheme to place and deliver coded packets in a less optimistic way.

Biography:

Alex Dimakis is an Associate Professor in the Electrical & Computer Engineering department at The University of Texas at Austin. Prof. Dimakis received his Ph.D. in 2008 and M.S. degree in 2005 in electrical engineering and computer sciences from UC Berkeley and the Diploma degree from the National Technical University of Athens in 2003. During 2009 he was a CMI postdoctoral scholar at Caltech. He received an NSF Career award in 2011, a Google faculty research award in 2012 and the Eli Jury dissertation award in 2008. He is the co-recipient of several best paper awards including the joint Information Theory and Communications Society Best Paper Award in 2012.

Email:

Address:University of Texas at Austin, 1616 Guadalupe St, Austin, Texas, United States, 78701