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The project “A Software Toolbox for Computing and Exploring the Fundamental Limits of Information Systems”, funded by NSF, will start in the fall. The goal of this project is to build software tools to facilitate computer-aided investigation of information systems, which can be used to more efficiently investigate information theoretic limits in more and more complex information systems.

The paper “A generic transformation to enable optimal repair in MDS codes for distributed storage systems,” by Jie Li, Xiaohu Tang, and Chao Tian just appeared in IEEE Trans. on IT. This is the journal version of the ISIT paper “A generic transformation for optimal repair bandwidth and rebuilding access in MDS codes”.

The paper “Fundamental limits of coded caching: from uncoded prefetching to coded prefetching,” which introduces a new perspective and extension on coded caching strategies, by K. Zhang and C. Tian, was accepted to by IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC). The paper “Symmetry, outer bounds, and code constructions: A computer-aided investigation on the fundamental limits of caching” by Dr. Tian just appeared in Entropy journal, which provides a semi-tutorial on the computed-aided method to investigate the fundamental limit of coding systems.

The paper “Caching and delivery via interference elimination,” by C. Tian and J. Chen, just appeared in the March issue of IEEE Trans. on IT. This paper introduced a general class of coded prefetching scheme, which improves the state of art for coded caching systems.

Our new paper “On the tradeoff region of secure exact-repair regenerating codes,” by S. Shao, T. Liu, C. Tian, and C. Shen, was published in IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, Vol. 63, No. 11, pp. 7253-7266, Nov. 2017. We provide a clearer picture on the geometry of the tradeoff region of secure exact-repair regenerating codes. Past results appeared to suggest that the tradeoff region has only one corner point, however, we show that this is only true for more stringent security requirements, but not so for less stringent parameter settings.

Kai’s paper on symmetry reduction of information inequalities has been accepted by IEEE Trans. on communications. The problem considered in this work is the number of variables and constrains in the entropy LP, after the symmetry reduction alone. Polya’s theorem is used to help this counting task.

My research group moved to the ECE Department at Texas A&M University from the EECS Department at the University of Tennessee in Fall 2017. We are grateful to the staff and faculty members in both departments who helped us make this a smooth transition.