[CPCC] Seminar by Prof. Farshad Lahouti

Hamid Jafarkhani hamidj at uci.edu
Mon Feb 29 15:47:44 PST 2016


Title: Fundamental Limits of Crowdsourcing

Speaker: Prof. Farshad Lahouti

Date: March 8, 2016, Tue.

Time: 11:00 AM

Venue: CALIT2 Room 3008

ABSTRACT

Digital crowdsourcing (CS) is a modern approach to perform certain large 
projects using small contributions of a large crowd. In CS, a taskmaster 
typically breaks down the project into small batches of tasks and 
assigns them to so-called workers with imperfect skill levels. The 
crowdsourcer then collects and analyzes the results for inference and 
serving the purpose of the project. In this work, the CS problem, as a 
human-in-the-loop computation problem, is modeled and analyzed in an 
information theoretic rate-distortion framework. The purpose is to seek 
ultimate performance bounds that one can achieve by any form of query 
from the crowd and any decoding (inference) algorithm with a given 
budget. The results also shed light on optimized strategies for the 
design of crowdsourcing systems. We also present and analyze a query 
scheme dubbed k-ary incidence coding.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Farshad Lahouti is currently a visiting professor of electrical 
engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where 
he initiated the digital ventures design program. He received his B.Sc. 
from the University of Tehran, Iran and his Ph.D. from the University of 
Waterloo, Canada both in Electrical Engineering in 1997 and 2002, 
respectively. In 2005, he joined the faculty of the School of Electrical 
and Computer Engineering, University of Tehran, where he founded the 
Center for Wireless Multimedia Communications. He also served as the 
head of the Communications Engineering Department from 2008 to 2012. Dr 
Lahouti is the recipient of the distinguished scientist award from Iran 
Nation Academy of Sciences in 2014. His current research interests are 
coding and information theory, signal processing and communication 
theory with applications to wireless networks, cyber-physical systems 
and man-machine symbiosis, and biological and neuronal networks. 
Information on his recent works can be found here: 
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~lahouti.



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