[Colloq] Hiring Talk, Atilla Eryilmaz, Monday, March 12, 11am.

[Rachel Kalweit]

College of Computer and Information Science Colloquium

Presents a Hiring Talk By:
Atilla Eryilmaz
MIT

Who will speak on:
Opportunities and Challenges in Networking: A Unifying Approach

Monday, March 12, 2007
11:00 am
366 West Village H
Northeastern University

Abstract:
The next generation of networks is expected to support a wide variety of 
applications in dynamic, interference-constrained, unreliable, and 
resource-limited network settings. These systems with such diverse 
demands necessitate a radically new approach to network design urging a 
cross-disciplinary effort that spans various areas of information 
sciences, decisions and systems engineering, computer science, 
mathematics, and economics. This talk will demonstrate the success of 
this general unifying approach through the discussion of our recent 
works in the area of `Network Coding'.

Network coding is a novel data transmission strategy that promises 
significant throughput gains over traditional routing strategies. 
Although there has been much recent research on this new strategy, 
significant questions remain on its practical implementation and a 
fundamental understanding of its performance. In this talk, I will 
describe our recent works that have provided answers to both of these 
vital questions.

First, I will present a new algorithm for implementing intersession 
network coding in general networks. The main innovation would be to show 
that the ideas underpinning network coding can be extended to serve 
multiple sessions by allowing coding across sessions. I will present a 
novel routing/scheduling/coding algorithm that provides a practical 
method to apply network coding to multiple point-to-point sessions. This 
algorithm is shown to achieve any rate within the largest known 
achievable rate region for intersession network coding. Some information 
about a multi-institution DARPA project, in which this algorithm is 
scheduled to be implemented, will also be presented.

Second, the challenging problem of the delay performance of network 
coding will be addressed. I will introduce a key scenario that will be 
used to reveal the significant delay gains obtained from network coding 
over traditional strategies. This is the first work that quantifies 
these gains. Further, I will explain how these gains translate into 
economic benefits in a dynamic setting. I will conclude with a brief 
overview of several other projects inspired by the unifying approach 
that also led to fundamental and surprising findings.

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY:
Atilla Eryilmaz received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and 
Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
in 2001 and 2005, respectively. Since 2005, he has been working as a 
Postdoctoral Associate at the Laboratory for Information and Decision 
Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research 
interests include wireless and sensor networks, algorithms, optimization 
theory, stochastic processes and network coding.

Host: Guevara Noubir