Prof. Michelle Effros of California Institute of Technology

The traditional view of information theory breaks communication systems into small components whose performance limits we study in isolation. While the motivation for such a "divide and conquer" strategy is obvious, the approach has many draw backs.  In this work, we take an alternative approach, studying small components by investigating their impact on the larger networks in which they are employed.  This new approach is useful for understanding both network vulnerabilities and communication opportunities, yielding surprising new insights and tantalizing new mysteries for future exploration.

Biography:

Michelle Effros (S’93–M’95–SM’03–F’09) received the B.S. degree with distinction in 1989, the M.S. degree in 1990, and the Ph.D. degree in 1994, all in electrical engineering from Stanford University. She joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology in 1994, where she is currently the George Van Osdol Professor of Electrical Engineering. Her research interests include information theory, network coding, data compression, and communications.

Prof. Effros received Stanford’s Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Scholastic Award (for excellence in engineering) in 1989, the Hughes Masters Full-Study Fellowship in 1989, the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship in 1990, the AT&T Ph.D. Scholarship in 1993, the NSF CAREER Award in 1995, the Charles Lee Powell Foundation Award in 1997, the Richard Feynman-Hughes Fellowship in 1997, and an Okawa Research Grant in 2000. She was cited by Technology Review as one of the world’s top 100 young innovators in 2002. She and her co-authors received the Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award in 2009. She became a fellow of the IEEE in 2009.

She is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Phi Beta Kappa, and Sigma Xi. She served as the Editor of the IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter 1995 to 1998 and as a Member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society from 1998 to 2003 and from 2008 to the present. She served President of the Information Theory Society 2015. She was a member of the Advisory Committee and the Committee of Visitors for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate at the National Science Foundation from 2009 to 2012 and in 2014, respectively. She served on the IEEE Signal Processing Society Image and Multi-Dimensional Signal Processing (IMDSP) Technical Committee from 2001 to 2007 and on ISAT from 2006 to 2009. She served as Associate Editor for the joint special issue on Networking and Information Theory in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and the IEEE Transactions on Networking/ACM Transactions on Networking and as Associate Editor for Source Coding for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 2004 to 2007. She has served on numerous technical program committees and review boards, including serving as general co-chair for the 2009 Network Coding Workshop and technical program committee co-chair for the 2012 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory.