Research

Current Research

Research in the Effros lab contributes to the extraordinary advances in information storage and transmission technologies that fuel progress in areas like communication and computing and to developments in understanding information transmission, storage, and processing in the brain. In both cases, we rely on a fundamental understanding of mathematical tools that enable us to characterize the long-term behavior of long sequences of statistically dependent stochastic events.

Current work on communication technologies focuses primarily on network systems and communication scenarios characterized by uncertainty or change. Areas of major contribution include universal source codes, image compression, multi-user source coding, multi-user channel coding, network coding, and secure communications. This work spans the spectrum from deriving information theoretic bounds on the limits of performance in a given communication system to development of practical algorithms for approaching those bounds with modern communication devices.

Current work on neuroscience theory focuses primarily on understanding the phenomenon of neuronal stability and untangling its role in the brain's techniques for creating, storing, and retrieving memories. This effort involves developing a rich new family of mathematical tools and techniques for characterizing the stochastic behavior of model neurons -- both individually and in networks. Given an understanding of this range of behaviors, we then work to understand whether and how the phenomena of memory can arise from the given behaviors. Together, these efforts create a bridge for uncovering how the microscopic behavior of individual neurons together create the macroscopic phenomena of memory.