Meeting of the minds

At CWIT in Kelowna, here are the only three Canadians to be president of the IEEE Information Theory Society.  From left to right: Professors Vijay Bhargava, Ian Blake, and Frank Kschischang.

Two papers at CWIT

I have two papers at this week's Canadian Workshop on Information Theory in Kelowna:

1. Lu Cui and Andrew W. Eckford, "The delay selector channel: Definition and capacity bounds"
Session: Coding and Information Theory I, Wednesday May 18, 9:00-10:40 AM

This is work from Lu's master's thesis [PDF]. The "delay selector channel" is a discrete-time channel model that captures some of the features of molecular communication with Brownian motion. The main contribution of this paper is a closed-form lower bound on the channel capacity.

2. Josephine P. K. Chu, Andrew W. Eckford, and Raviraj S. Adve, "Distributed optimization of the Bhattacharyya parameter in wireless relay networks"
Session: Relay Assisted Communication, Thursday May 19, 2:00-3:20 PM

This is work from Josephine's Ph.D. thesis. We give an iterative, distributed solution to the non-convex multi-source, multi-relay resource allocation problem, where the objective is to optimize the Bhattacharyya parameter for each source's transmission.


Paper PDFs will be posted shortly. I will be in Kelowna and presenting both papers.

A quick exercise on divergent sequences

I have a sequence and I'm trying to show that it converges.  Here's my attempt to turn a morning of frustration into a blog post.

Let s(j), j = 1, 2, ..., be a sequence of real numbers with the following properties:

• There exist constants a and b such that a <= s(j) <= b for all j.
• In the limit as j goes to infinity, s(j) - s(j-1) = 0.

Conjecture: Any sequence s(j) satisfying these properties is convergent.

Your job: Disprove the conjecture by providing a counterexample.

There are many possible answers, but I give one in the comments.