The ‘bit’ transformed how we compress, transmit and store information. But as more information is produced by machines, for machines, do the same rules still apply?
Professor Deniz Gündüz, Professor in Information Processing, explores how information theory can help answer questions emerging in the age of intelligent machines.
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Abstract
In 1948, Claude Shannon showed how to put a number on information: how much a source can be compressed, and how much of it a noisy channel can carry. Those limits turned communication from a craft into a science, and everything digital: the Internet, mobile telephony, data storage, has been built around them. Shannon also gave us the ‘bit’: common currency of the information age, which let compression, transmission, computation and security be treated as four separate problems, solved by different engineers.
Soon, most of the information crossing our networks will be produced by machines, for machines. How will billions of them communicate with each other: must they agree on a language in advance, or can they learn one? And do those old boundaries still make sense, when a network can compute, a compressor can learn, and the whole chain from sensor to decision can be trained as one?
Biography
