Prof. Deniz Gunduz from Imperial College London - Prof. Deniz Gunduz from Imperial College London Communication systems
Date: - Location: Eurecom
Abstract: As intelligence increasingly takes the form of autonomous agents, tomorrow's communication networks are expected to be dominated by agentic traffic, and the fundamental question shifts from "how many bits can one send reliably?" to "what should one communicate to this agent, in this state, at this moment, so that it acts as desired?" This talk presents a unifying framework for such pragmatic communication problems, in which two agents act on a shared environment and are judged solely by cumulative reward, and the channel can be whatever couples one agent's actions to the other's observations: a wire, a control trajectory, sensor measurements, or even silence. Classical joint source-channel coding (JSCC) and semantic communication are recovered as the degenerate, one-shot, receiver-blind case of this general framework. Through six case studies, from remote control over noisy or rate-limited channels to communication through actions in Markov decision processes (MDPs) and linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control systems, I will show how control laws, stochastic codes and channel capacity results emerge from a single formulation, and close with open problems in multi-agent pragmatic communication, secrecy and privacy. Bio: Deniz Gündüz is a Professor of Information Processing at the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department at Imperial College London, UK. He is the deputy head of the Intelligent Systems Group, and lead the Information Processing and Communications Lab. His research interests lie in the areas of information theory, machine learning, wireless communications and privacy. Dr. Gündüz is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is the recipient of the IEEE Communications Society - Communication Theory Technical Committee (CTTC) Early Achievement Award in 2017, Starting (2016), Consolidator (2022) and Proof-of-Concept (2023) Grants of the European Research Council (ERC), and has co-authored several award-winning papers, including the IEEE Communications Society - Young Author Best Paper Award (2022), and the IEEE International Conference on Communications Best Paper Award (2023). He received the Imperial College London - President's Award for Excellence in Research Supervision in 2023.
