Applications include encryption, viewing photos from the Internet and medical diagnostic imaging. In some respects, what Daubechies is doing is bringing to electronics what the human brain already does pretty well. People are constantly fine-tuning the world around them to focus on a task while blocking out extraneous stimuli, or noise. We do this unconsciously. While the brain performs screening tasks well because of tens of thousands of years of evolution, signal processing via electronics is a relatively new endeavor, and scientists like Daubechies are working to make the process more efficient and more accurate.
Nothing is perfect, nothing is completely sharp.
She approaches the challenge from a mathematical point of view, talking to people in various fields where data transmission technology is applied, such as medicine, neuroscience and engineering. I talk to them, get a sense of what is important to them and translate that into mathematical tools. Daubechies' tools are often undulating waveforms, which can be added together or subtracted to identify bundles of data. Ways to reduce a data stream Reducing data to as few building blocks as possible increases the likelihood that the data will appear on the other end of transmission closely resembling the original. For example, if there was a photo with a large block of white, rather than transmit data about every point of white, including nuances in shading, the data would be decomposed to wavelets which would describe a simplified white block.