John Kieffer
Professor

B.S., 1967, Applied Math., University of Missouri-Rolla
M.S., Math., University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign
Ph.D., Math., University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign

Telephone: (612) 625-8574
E-mail: kieffer@ece.umn.edu
Web Page: http://www.ece.umn.edu/users/kieffer/

My research interests lie within the area of communications called information theory, in which we are concerned with the existence and design of codes for fast, reliable transmission of sequential data from an information source through a communication channel. The source is described via a random process model. In order to determine the communication system performance, one needs to analyze the effect of the code and the channel on this model. To accomplish this, one may have to develop new mathematical techniques, such as when the code or the channel (or both) involve feedback. Of particular interest to me is the case in which the source model is described by unknown parameters. Then the coding must either be robust in the sense that system performance is maintained no matter what the value of the parameters, or else one must do coding and estimation hand-in-hand as one looks at more and more source data, adapting one's code as one learns more about the source via estimation of the source parameters. Interesting new techniques are being developed in this regard.


Selected Publications

J. Kieffer and E. Yang, "Sequential codes, lossless compression of individual sequences, and Kolmogorov complexity," IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, vol. 42, pp. 29-39, 1996.

E. Yang and J. Kieffer, "Simple universal lossy data compression schemes derived from Lempel-Ziv algorithm," IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, vol. 42, pp. 239-245, 1996.

J. Kieffer, "A survey of the theory of source coding with a fidelity criterion," IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, vol. 39, pp. 1473-1490, 1993.

J. Kieffer, "Strongly consistent code-based identification and order estimation for constrained finite-state model classes," IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, vol. 39, pp. 893-902, 1993.

J. Kieffer, "Sample converses in source coding theory," IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, vol. 37, pp. 263-268, 1991.