Bio

Eva Song received her master’s and PhD degree in the Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 2012 and 2015, respectively. She received her B.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, in 2010. In her PhD work, she studied lossy compression and rate-distortion based information-theoretic secrecy in communications. She is the recipient of Wu Prize for Excellence in 2014. During 2012, she interned at Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, NJ, to study secrecy in optics communications. Her general research interests include: information theory, security, compression and machine learning.

A New Approach to Lossy Compression and Applications to Security,

A New Approach to Lossy Compression and Applications to Security

Rate-distortion theory is studied in the context of lossy compression networks with and without security concerns. A new source coding technique using the “likelihood encoder” is proposed that achieves the best known compression rate in various lossy compression settings. It is demonstrated that the use of the likelihood encoder together with the Wyner’s soft-covering lemma yields simple achievability proofs for classical source coding problems. The cases of the point-to-point rate-distortion function, the rate-distortion function with side information at the decoder (i.e. the Wyner-Ziv problem), and the multi-terminal source coding inner bound (i.e. the Berger-Tung problem) are examined. Furthermore, a non-asymptotic analysis is used for the point-to-point case to examine the upper bound on the excess distortion provided by this method. The likelihood encoder is also compared, both in concept and performance, to a recent alternative technique using properties of random binning. Also, the likelihood encoder source coding technique is further used to obtain new results in rate-distortion based secrecy systems. Several secure source coding settings, such as using shared secret key and correlated side information, are investigated. It is shown mathematically that the rate-distortion based formulation for secrecy fully generalizes the traditional equivocation based secrecy formulation. The extension to joint source-channel security is also considered using similar encoding techniques. The rate-distortion based secure source-channel analysis has been applied to optical communication for reliable and secure delivery of an information source through an insecure multimode fiber channel.