CERIAS Weekly Security Seminar – Purdue University
Wojciech Szpankowski, What is Information?
Information permeates every corner of our lives and shapes ouruniverse. Understanding and harnessing information holds the potential forsignificant advances. The breadth and depth of underlying concepts ofthe science of information transcend traditional disciplinary boundariesof scientific and commercial endeavors. Information can be manifestedin various forms: business information is measured in dollars; chemical information is contained in shapes of molecules; biological information stored and processed in our cells prolongs life. So what is information? In this talk we first attempt to identify the most important features of information and define it in the broadest possible sense. We subsequently turn to the notion and theory of information introduced by Claude Shannon in 1948 that served as the backbone for digital communication. We go on to bridge Shannon information with Boltzmann's entropy, Maxwell's demon, Landauer's principle and Bennett's irreversible computations. We point out, however, that while Shannon created a successful and beautiful theoryof information for communication, a wide spread application of informationtheory to economics, biology, life science and complex networks seems to bestill awaiting us. We shall discuss some examples that recently crop up inbiology, chemistry, computer science, and quantum physics. We concludewith a list of challenges for future research.We hope to put forward some educated questions, rather than answers, to the issues and tools that lay before researchers interested in information. About the speaker: Before coming to Purdue, Wojciech Szpankowski was assistant professor at the Technical University of Gdansk, and in 1984 he was assistant professor at the McGill University, Montreal. During 1992-93, he was professeur invité at INRIA, Rocquencourt, France. His research interests cover analysis of algorithms, data compression, information theory, analytic combinatorics, random structures, networking, stability problems in distributed systems, modeling of computer systems and computer communication networks, queueing theory, and operations research. His recent work is devoted to the probabilistic analysis of algorithms on words, analytic information theory, and designing efficient multimedia data compression schemes based on approximate pattern matching. He is a recipient of the Humboldt Fellowship. He has been a guest editor for special issues in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Theoretical Computer Science, Random Structures & Algorithms, and Algorithmica. Currently, he is editing a special issue on "Analysis of Algorithms" in Algorithmica. He serves on the editorial boards of Theoretical Computer Science, Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, and the book series Advances in the Theory of Computation and Computational Mathematics.
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