A conversation I had today in Brewed Awakening while reading research papers:

ANDREI: So what do you work on anyway?
ME: Well, I do information theory, which is…
ANDREI: Really? That’s so cool!

I think this is the first and last time I will have a conversation like this. But it’s amazing how happy it made me that someone thinks what I do is cool.

I have completed my trek through the Transactions on Information Theory and the results are posted. I identified approximately 450 articles of interest, some for pure humor value, such as editorials and a paper in French that I can’t read, but most looked “pretty interesting.” I’m not sure what to do with the list now, but now it’s off my to do list. It productivity! Hooray productivity!

ISIT is a pretty huge conference — for every paper that I see presented, I miss 7 others in parallel sessions. Oftentimes they put very popular papers in small rooms, which only enhances the crowdedness I feel. Today is the last day, so things are thinning out a bit, which is nice.

A frustrating thing I’ve come to realize is that it takes me a woefully long time to figure out that a paper is pretty uninteresting. I spend a fair amount of time trying to really understand what is going on, often in spite of the presentation, only to have a conversation with another group member about it later on that makes it clear that the result was not that interesting. Of course, “interesting” is subjective, but perhaps it is best to go into talks with a healthy dose of skepticism to avoid the rollercoaster ride of excitement and disappointment.

A second problem is that the nametags are hung around the necks, so if you try to read the name of a female conference attendee you invariably look like you are ogling her chest. Given the gender ratio at this conference it must make it awfully uncomfortable for them.

My paper was rejected from Globecomm with a 2/5 rating (weak reject). And it was rejected for reasons that are entirely related to my poor exposition of the ideas. Nothing like a good heaping plate of blame and guilt to dull the sharp edge of summer.

Made it from 1953-1962 in my journal abstract marathon. It’s interesting to see how many ideas that come up nowadays were vaguely formulated so far back in the past. It’s also interesting to see how lon it took for terminology to become finalized. Common concepts in my field such as mutual information were not pinned down for a while, and there are editorials calling for this or that to be well defined and for definitions to be fixed. There’s a hilarious editorial by Doob, who criticizes the way in which results start out as intuitive and appealing but incorrect, and in the bloody iterative process of making them mathematically rigorous they lose their applicability, a criticism which is still valid.

The most depressing thing for me is that very simple results that we do for homework in classes now were once considered worthy enough for publication in a journal. That’s progress, and it is good. But it’s getting harder and harder to tell an interesting story I think.

Here’s a quote I came across during my new mission. It’s by Claude Shannon, the father of Information Theory, in an editorial called “The Bandwagon”, published in IRE Transactions on Information Theory, 1956.
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I have a new plan to read or skim the abstracts of every paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. And then form a list of ones that I think are worth taking another look at. A sort of exhaustive literature search, if you will. I’ll post an update in a month after I get past the first decade.

[I’ve been spending the last week trying to contextualize some work I’ve been doing so that we can publish it in a journal. Since I knew nothing about the field earlier, I figure writing it out in somewhat simpler terms would help clarify the big concepts for me. Read on at your peril.]

One of the biggest engineering challenges in computer networks for the future is increasing the total available bandwidth to be shared by users. Soon broadband-at-home will be severely limited by the fact that all of the users have to share some portion of cable, and not all of the data can go on that cable at the same time. Some future internet applications may require guaranteed data rates, which would be bad news at the current rate. Fiber optic cable can theoretetically support data rates up to hundreds of gigbits per second using wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM), a technology in which different wavelengths of light share the cable in a noninterfering way. In order to harness the speed of fiber optics, technologies are needed to provide optical routing for traffic control, because transforming the optical data to electronic data essentially slows it down to the data rate for electronic communications.
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