Prof. Amin Gohari

Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Topic: The Auxiliary Receiver Approach in Network Information Theory

Abstract:

In these lectures, I focus on three fundamental open problems in network information theory: finding the capacity regions of the broadcast channel, the interference channel, and the relay channel. These channel models are important because they are the building blocks of a general communication network. The lectures focus on techniques for proving “infeasibility results” for achievable rate regions. In particular, I will present the novel auxiliary receiver approach as a mathematical tool for writing outer bounds in network information theory. This technique yields new outer bounds for the relay, interference, and broadcast channel settings. These bounds strictly outperform classical outer bounds at least in some regimes. For instance, we strictly improve on the cutset outer bound for the scalar Gaussian relay channel, the outer bounds for the Gaussian Z-interference channel, and the outer bounds for the two receiver broadcast channels. The technique’s basic idea is to consider one or multiple “auxiliary” receivers and use their past and/or future when identifying the auxiliary random variables.

Bio:

Amin Gohari received the B.Sc. degree from the Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2004, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 2010. From 2010 to 2011, he held a post-doctoral position with the Institute of Network Coding, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. From 2011 to 2022, he was with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Sharif University of Technology and with the Tehran Institute for Advanced Studies, Khatam University. He joined the Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2022. His research interests include classical and quantum information theory, game theory and molecular communication.
He received the 2010 Eli Jury Award from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley, for outstanding achievement in the area of communication networks, and the 2009–2010 Bernard Friedman Memorial Prize in Applied Mathematics from the Department of Mathematics, UC Berkeley, 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 the coauthor of a paper that won the ISIT 2013 Jack Wolf Student Paper Award and two that were finalists in 2012 and 2014 (as a Supervisor). He was selected as an Exemplary Reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Communicatoins in 2015 and 2016. He served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 2018 to 2021. He also received the IEEE Iran Section’s Young Researcher Award in 2021.