Semester 6 of my Ph.D: Taking Stock: Part II

This post is about taking stock of my Ph.D progress. I suppose I should do that now. Part I dealt with many sundry events in the summer, but I left out what I did for my Ph.D.

At the beginning of the summer, I started reading "Optimality and Approximate Optimality of Source-Channel Separation in Networks" by Tian, Chen, Diggavi, and Shamai. (OAOSCSN from here on). A really nice paper, it deals with issues of source, network and channel separation in networks.

After about a week of reading, I realized that I did not know enough about many aspects of network information theory to be able to effectively decode the paper. I was fortunate to obtain Gamal and Kim's Lecture Notes in Network Information Theory (LNIT) around May end during my Bangalore (and IISc) trip from Prof. Sundar Rajan, my advisor's (Bikash Dey's) advisor. (Hopefully, in about 2-2.5 years' time, my academic grandfather).

Much of June was spent decoding parts of LNIT, and I have made progress on the 1st fifteen chapters of the book. I have more or less successfully decoded OAOSCSN.

Currently, I find the whole topic of separation problems and theorems fascinating and have been reading up quite a bit on the topic. Besides the work of the above group, there are great papers by Effros's, Medard's groups and also some by Gastpar.

Hopes/ Plans for the coming semester
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I have not been assigned T.A duty this semester, so I hope to be able to accomplish relatively more.

In decreasing order of priority: 
1. Make sufficient progress on a problem to be able to write a conference paper for the International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2012. The deadline is Feb 2012. Some problems  have been suggested in OAOSCSN itself.

2. Decode all of Gamal and Kim's LNIT by the end of the semester, with the exception of one or two chapters, which do not interest me much. That is a total of 24 chapters, less one or two. Many open problems are suggested at the chapter end sections, and also some great references.

3. Audit Prof. Rajbabu's course EE779 on "Advanced Topics in Signal Processing". Sit-through Prof. Diwan's lectures on Network Information Flow (and possibly Randomized Algorithms) in his course CS601 "Algorithms and Complexity". Time permitting, maybe learn a little bit of Saravanan's EE605 "Error-Correcting Codes".

Again, I wonder if I am being too ambitious.

Semester 6 of my Ph.D: Taking Stock: Part I

The start of a new semester. Methinks it is time to take stock of my Ph.D progress and my plans/hopes for the next 2-2.5 years.

But first, a quick recap of the summer.

The Summer of 2011
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The summer that passed has been mildly eventful. In May, I attended the Joint Telematics Group 2011 workshop held at IITB. Almost immediately after, a wedding in my extended family in Bangalore.

I used the trip to renew some contacts at the Indian Institute of Science made during the JTG. Also, quite by chance, I met my advisor's advisor, who gave me a lot of material in Information Theory, among which was a soft copy of Gamal and Kim's "Lecture Notes in Network Information Theory" -- LNIT for short (More on that later). I renewed acquaintance with a friend from my undergrad IIT days, who is now a faculty in the Center for Neuroscience at IISc. Plus I purchased a ton of books at the IISc bookstore, including "The Pleasures of Counting" by Korner.

On my return to Bombay, in mid-June, I had an endoscopic sinus surgery -- a minor and routine procedure, but one which was to be performed under general anaesthesia. My mother and father had set my mind at ease about the procedure, and I recall feeling only a very mild anxiety about the surgery. After the anaesthetic had been administered, I must have "gone out like a light", for when I came to, I was informed that the procedure was over.

During the recuperation period, I was homebound and did not check my emails, so I missed Prof. B. G. Fernandes's email re T.A duty allotments. Consequently, I have not been assigned any TA duties this semester.

Taking Stock: Part II follows shortly.