Colloquia / Seminars / Industry Talks

Language processing is an important tool for big-data analysis. It aims at discovering the deep connections and structures inside text data. We present a new application of language processing in this talk, which is error correction through language processing. While error-correcting codes are already approaching theoretical limits in channel capacity, language processing provides a second fundamental approach to error correction, namely to use the ample internal redundancy in data for error correction. It can be integrated with error-correcting codes to significantly improve the reliability of data storage, and is fully compatible with existing storage systems.

The reliability of storage systems can also be improved by new coding techniques adapted to the physical properties of storage devices. In recent years, flash memories have emerged as a revolutionizing technology, and their special properties introduce very interesting coding problems. I will introduce the challenges for flash memories and related nonvolatile memories, review the existing coding techniques, -- including codes for rewriting data, rank modulation, error correction, etc. -- and look forward to some potential approaches for the future.

Anxiao (Andrew) Jiang received the B.Sc. degree from Tsinghua University, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Texas A&M University. He has been a visiting professor at California Institute of Technology, University of California in San Diego, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Singapore Data Storage Institute (DSI) and Israel Institute of Technology (Technion), and a consulting researcher at HP Labs, EMC and Microsoft Research. His research interests include information theory, data storage, networks and algorithm design.

Prof. Jiang is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2008 for his research on information theory for flash memories and a recipient of the 2009 IEEE Communications Society Best Paper Award in Signal Processing and Coding for Data Storage.