Harmonic analysis of deep convolutional neural networks

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) used in practice employ potentially hundreds of layers and 10,000s of nodes. Such network sizes entail formidable challenges in training, operating, and storing the network. Very deep and wide CNNs may therefore not be well suited to applications operating under severe resource constraints as is the case, e.g., in low-power embedded and mobile platforms. This talk develops a harmonic analysis approach to CNNs with the aim of understanding the impact of CNN topology, specifically depth and width, on the network’s feature extraction and expressivity capabilities.

Readings for this lecture

Helmut Bolcskei

Helmut Bolcskei is a professor in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at ETH Zurich. His research interests are in information theory, mathematical signal processing, machine learning, and statistics. He received the Dipl.-Ing. and Dr. techn. degrees in electrical engineering from Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria, in 1994 and 1997, respectively. In 1998 he was with Vienna University of Technology. From 1999 to 2001 he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Information Systems Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering, and in the Department of Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA. He was in the founding team of Iospan Wireless Inc., a Silicon Valley-based startup company (acquired by Intel Corporation in 2002) specialized in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems for high-speed Internet access, and was a co-founder of Celestrius AG, Zurich, Switzerland. From 2001 to 2002 he was an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been with ETH Zurich since 2002, where he is a Professor of Electrical Engineering. He was a visiting researcher at Philips Research Laboratories Eindhoven, The Netherlands, ENST Paris, France, and the Heinrich Hertz Institute Berlin, Germany.

He received the 2001 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award, the 2006 IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Best Paper Award, the 2010 Vodafone Innovations Award, the ETH "Golden Owl" Teaching Award, is a Fellow of the IEEE, a 2011 EURASIP Fellow, was a Distinguished Lecturer (2013-2014) of the IEEE Information Theory Society, an Erwin Schrödinger Fellow (1999-2001) of the Austrian National Science Foundation (FWF), was included in the 2014 Thomson Reuters List of Highly Cited Researchers in Computer Science, and is the 2016 Padovani Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society. He served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, and the EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing. He was editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory during the period 2010-2013. He served on the editorial board of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine and is currently on the editorial boards of "Foundations and Trends in Networking” and "Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory”. He was TPC co-chair of the 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory and the 2016 IEEE Information Theory Workshop and serves on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society. He has been a delegate of the president of ETH Zurich for faculty appointments since 2008.

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