cfaed Seminar Series

Abstract:
Concave functions play a central role in optimization theory. So-called
ex-ponentially concave functions are of similar importance in
information the-ory. In the presentation, we discuss mathematical
properties of the class of exponentiallyconcave functions, like
closedness under linear and convex combinationand relations to quasi-,
Jensen- and Schur-concavity. Infor-mationtheoretic quantities such as
self-information and (scaled)entropy are shown to be exponentially
concave. Furthermore, newinequalities for the Kullback-Leibler
divergence, for the entropyof mixture distributi-ons,and for mutual
information are presented.

Bio:
Gholamreza ALIREZAEI received the Diploma and Doctoral degree in
electrical engineering from RWTH Aachen University. From 2002 to 2008,
he was a research assistant at the Institute of High Frequency
Technology of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information
Technology at RWTH. From 2008 to 2011, he was the R&D leader at the
ATecoM GmbH. From 2011 onwards, he is with the Institute for Theoretical
Information Technology at RWTH and he currently works as chief engineer
responsible for research, project acquisition and project management. In
addition, he holds lecturer positions with Technical University of
Munich (TUM) and RWTH. His research interests include the design of
communication sys-tems and their development. Furthermore, he tackles
hard mathematical problems arisen from estimation, classification and
information theory. In particular, nonconvex optimization problems,
analytical resource allocati-on, signal and target classification, and
determination of theoretical bounds and inequalities for special
functions have been the main topics in the more recent past. Gholamreza
has received a number of awards and recognitions. Among others, he is
holder of the prestigious Vodafone Y-oung-Researcher Prize, the
ITG-Literature Award, and the Friedrich-Wilhelm Prize. He has served as
reviewer and member of the Technical Program Committee in numerous IEEE
conferences, including ICC, ISIT, ISWCS, GLOBECOM and WiSEE. He also
serves as reviewer for both the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing
and the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.