Amin Aminzadeh
Associate Professor Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
The Chinese university of Hong Kong
Title:
Super-modular f-divergences and their applications
Time: Thursday, May 4th 2023, 10:00 – 10:40
Abstract
Various measures of dissimilarity between two distributions defined on the same sample space are known in the literature. In this presentation, we will focus on generalized relative entropy, commonly referred to as f-divergence. f-divergences have found various applications in information theory, statistics, and machine learning among other fields. In this talk, we will introduce a new class of f-divergences called super-modular divergences and discuss some of their applications in statistics and information theory. In particular, we offer new bounds on the rate-distortion function in the finite blocklength regime as well as an extended Sanov’s bound for the hypothesis testing problem. This talk is based on a joint work with Saeed Masiha and Mohammad Hossein Yassaee.
Biography:
Amin Gohari received his B.Sc. degree from the Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2004 and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. From 2010-2011, he was a postdoc at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Institute of Network Coding. From 2011-2020 he was with the Electrical Engineering Department of Sharif University of Technology. He joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2022 and the Tehran Institute for Advanced Studies in 2020. Dr. Gohari received the IEEE Iran Section Young Researcher Award in 2021 and was selected as a Distinguished Lecturer by the IEEE Information Theory Society in 2019. He received the 2010 Eli Jury
Award from UC Berkeley, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, for outstanding achievement in the area of communication networks, and the 2009-2010 Bernard Friedman Memorial Prize in Applied Mathematics from UC Berkeley, Department of Mathematics, for demonstrated ability to do research in applied mathematics. He also received the Gold Medal from the 41st International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO 2000) and the First Prize from the 9th International Mathematical Competition for University Students (IMC 2002). He was a finalist for the best student paper award at the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) in three consecutive years, 2008, 2009, and 2010. He was also co-author of a paper that won the ISIT 2013 Jack Wolf student paper award and two that were finalists in 2012 and 2014 (as supervisor). He was selected as an exemplary reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Communications in 2015 and 2016. Dr. Gohari served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 2018 to 2021.