Research Stay at Stanford University, USA

During the winter term 2015-2016 Dr. Meik Dörpinghaus, research group leader at the Vodafone Chair and at cfaed, visited Stanford University for six months. Meik was hosted by Prof. Tsachy Weissman at the Information Systems Laboratory of Stanford’s Electrical Engineering Department. Prof. Weissman is an expert in the field of information theory and his group works on topics ranging from fundamental questions like the relation between information and estimation theory to more applied topics like data compression of genomic data.

The weekly group meetings gave Meik a very good insight into the current research in Prof. Weissman’s group and he took the opportunity to present some of his research results and especially some open problems on the capacity of noncoherent fading channels to initiate collaboration and get some new ideas on these problems. Moreover, with several well known information theorists the whole Information Systems Lab is a great and very stimulating place, with many talks and also many visitors from all over the world. His stay gave Meik also the chance to see, which new fields Stanford’s information theory people consider to be important. Some of the groups at Stanford started work in the field of machine learning, which recently became rather successful in many application areas. However, a theoretic foundation is hardly available which makes this field very interesting for information theorists. Fascinated by this field, Meik also started new work in this direction. Overall Meik’s stay at Stanford has been very beneficial, lead to new research ideas and he made several new contacts and deepened existing ones.

Meik would like to thank Prof. Tsachy Weissman and the members of his research group for their hospitality and very warm welcome. He would also like to thank the "Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden" (cfaed) as well as the Collaborative Research Center „Highly Adaptive Energy Efficient Computing“ (cfaed) for the financial support of this research stay.