Codes for Caching and Data Shuffling
Channel: UCIBrenICS
Date: 2019-02-08

The CS/NetSys Seminar Series is proud to present Daniela Tuninetti, Professor, University of Illinois, Chicago.

Recorded on Friday, February 8, 2019.

Title: "Codes for Caching and Data Shuffling"

Abstract: This talk highlights how coded multicast transmissions speeds up the information delivery phase in two distributed communication problems: caching and data shuffling. Caching is an efficient way to reduce network traffic congestion during peak hours by storing some content at the user's local cache memory, even without knowledge of users' later demands. Maddah-Ali and Niesen (MAN) in 2014 proposed a two-phase (placement phase and delivery phase) coded caching strategy where careful placement of content in the caches creates multicast opportunities for any users' demands. In this talk we will discuss the MAN scheme, its optimality, and its "global caching gain" compared to classical uncoded schemes. Data shuffling of training data among different computing nodes (or workers) is a core element to improve the statistical performance of modern large scale machine learning algorithms, but is often considered to be a significant bottleneck due to the heavy communication load it imposes on the system. In this talk, we will focus on distributed data shuffling, where workers are allowed to communicate with one another while no communication between the master and workers is allowed. We will discuss how coding can considerably reduce the communication load by aiming at aligning interference in a decentralized manner.

Joint work with: Kai Wan, Mingyue Ji, Pablo Piantanida, and Giuseppe Caire.

Bio: Daniela Tuninetti is currently a Professor within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), which she joined in 2005. Dr. Tuninetti got her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2002 from ENST/Telecom ParisTech (Paris, France, with work done at the Eurecom Institute in Sophia Antipolis, France), and she was a postdoctoral research associate at the School of Communication and Computer Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland) from 2002 to 2004. Dr. Tuninetti is a recipient of a Best Paper award at the European Wireless Conference in 
2002, of an NSF CAREER award in 2007, and named UIC University Scholar in 2015. Dr. Tuninetti was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter from 2006 to 2008; she was an Editor for IEEE Communication Letters from 2006 to 2009, for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications from 2011 to 2014, and for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 2015 to 2017. Dr. Tuninetti's research interests are in the ultimate performance limits of wireless interference networks (with special emphasis on cognition and user cooperation), coexistence between radar and communication systems, multi-relay networks, content-type coding, and caching systems.