Bio

Basak Guler received her B.Sc. degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey in 2009 and her M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Wireless Communications and Networking Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, in 2012. She is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree and is a graduate research assistant with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. Her research interests include information theory, social networks, semantic communications, source coding, data compression, interactive communication, and heterogeneous wireless networks.

Interaction, Communication, and Computation in Information and Social Networks

Interaction, Communication, and Computation in Information and Social Networks

Modern networks are designed to facilitate the interaction of humans with computers. These networks consist of actors with possibly different characteristics, goals, and interests. My research takes a mathematical approach to modeling semantic and social networks. I study the fundamental limits of the information transferred in real-world networks, and develop algorithms to make network applications human-centric. Unlike conventional communication networks, this necessitates taking into account the semantic relationships between words, phrases, or clauses, as well as the personal background, characteristics, and knowledge bases of the interacting parties. These differences can in turn lead to various interpretations of the received information in a communication system.

Modern network systems should be able to operate under such ambiguous environments, and adapt to the interpretation differences of the communicating parties. My goal is to incorporate these individual characteristics for designing effective network models that can leverage and adapt to the semantic and social features of the interacting parties. To do this, my research takes an interdisciplinary approach, rooted in information theory and optimization, and incorporates social networks, and mathematical logic. As such, we consider a diverse set of problems ranging from lossless and lossy source coding to reliable communication with social structures. We identify the optimal strategies to represent a remotely observed phenomenon when the communicating parties have individual and common backgrounds, as well as optimal interaction protocols for exchanging messages with semantic relationships.