Plenary Session Abstact

The fundamental problem of how best to move a signal from one place to another involves a diverse set of disciplines including source coding, channel coding, network theory, circuit design, system architecture and others. While all of these fields have matured greatly thanks to decades of intensive research and industry progress, there remain many fascinating challenges regarding how to optimize system design across these multiple areas. On a theoretical level, these challenges are reflected, for example, in the source-channel coding problem, which involves balancing the goal in source coding of reducing redundancy with the need in channel coding of adding redundancy. On a very practical level, efficiency across all the dimensions of communications system design, not just the source and the channel coding, will be critical in achieving high performance from the diverse types of multimedia communications devices that will emerge in the next several years. This talk will include an overview of the end-to-end communications system design problem, and draw from recent results in source-channel coding and low-power circuit design to illustrate approaches that have been used to date. The talk will also present examples using next-generation wireless communications protocols and systems to illustrate open issues whose resolution is critical to the quality of service that these systems will deliver.

John Villasenor received the B.S. degree from the University of Virginia in 1985, the M.S. from Stanford University in 1986, and the Ph.D. from Stanford in 1989, all in Electrical Engineering. From 1990 to 1992 he was with the Radar Science and Engineering section of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. He joined the University of California, Los Angeles in 1992 and is currently Professor and Vice Chair of the Electrical Engineering Department. Dr. Villasenor's research interests include source and channel coding, wireless multimedia communications, and configurable computing.

Last Update:  December 4, 1998         Ingo Höntsch