Combinatorics Seminar

When: Sunday, May 29, 10am
Where: Schreiber 309
Speaker: Eyal Lubetzky, Microsoft Research
Title: Optimal graph index coding

Abstract:

In the Index Coding problem a server holds a set of messages that it wishes to broadcast to a set of receivers. Each receiver is interested in one of the messages and has side-information consisting of some subset of the other messages. Given the side-information map as an input, the objective is to devise an optimal encoding scheme for the messages (i.e., one minimizing the broadcast length) that allows all the receivers to retrieve their required information.

The basic setting of Index Coding encodes the side-information map, the problem input, as an undirected graph and the fundamental parameter is then the limiting optimal broadcast rate as the message length tends to infinity. This parameter was unknown even for fairly small graphs, e.g. a cycle on 5 vertices.

I will review connections of this problem to notions from Extremal Graph Theory, featured in previous works with Stav and with Alon et al, and then proceed to some recent developments in its study using an information-theoretic analysis, in joint work with Anna Blasiak and Robert Kleinberg.