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In the broadest context, communications is the study of techniques to
allow for the reliable transmission of information.
The information we are dealing with can take many different forms.
It may be the conversation you are having on your cell phone, the web page
you have just downloaded, the data stored on your hard-drive, or even the
latest motion picture released on DVD. All these types of information
have in common the requirement that they be transferred from one place
(or time) to another. The purpose of our group is to study efficient ways
of achieving this task.
In order to design a communications system, techniques must be developed
which allow for the reliable, secure and speedy delivery of the data.
Mathematics is the central tool used to perform the design and analysis
of these techniques. The communications system designer will then
create a mathematical model of the system along with the requirements.
Techniques are then developed to satisfy the requirements while minimizing
the cost. This is analogous to an architect creating blueprints of a structure
before the building is built. In a sense, what we do is "architect"
the design of communications systems using mathematics as opposed to blueprints.
Other areas of communications are concerned with purely theoretical ideas
of how information is processed and transmitted. These areas develop
fundamental ideas which explain the performance of systems and give bounds
on the performance of any communication system.
Signal processing is key aspect of communications and involves devising
algorithms to achieve certain communication objectives. These goals may
be to clear up an information-bearing signal from random noise so it can
be better detected, restore blurry digital photographs so that they can
be better perceived by a human observer, or even train a neural network
for excellent pattern recognition capabilities. In all of these cases,
signal processing is a means to facilitate the effective communication
of information.
The principal questions that the discipline of communications aims to
answer are :
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What are the best approaches to transmit information for a given application?
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How do we make the data transmission more reliable?
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How do we make the data transmission more secure?
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How do we make data transmission faster?
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How do we manipulate and display the data to more effectively communicate
it to the user?
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How do we best create large networks of communicating machines (one example
of such a system is the Internet)?
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