Lecturer Profile |
Andrew Eckford is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at York University, Toronto, Canada. He received the B.Eng. degree from the Royal Military College of Canada in 1996, and the M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Toronto in 1999 and 2004, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. Andrew held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Notre Dame and the University Of Toronto, prior to taking up a faculty position at York in 2006. He has held courtesy appointments at the University of Toronto and Case Western Reserve University; in 2018, he was named a Senior Fellow of Massey College, Toronto. Andrew’s research interests include the application of information theory to nonconventional channels and systems, especially the use of molecular and biological means to communicate. Andrew's research has been covered in media including The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and IEEE Spectrum. His research received the 2015 IET Communications Innovation Award, and was a finalist for the 2014 Bell Labs Prize. Andrew is also a co-author of the textbook Molecular Communication, published by Cambridge University Press. |
Lecture Abstract |
How can we communicate using molecules? This question may unlock new applications in nanorobotics and medicine, but has only recently attracted attention from communication and information theorists. The answer to the question is surprisingly difficult: not only is the medium unfamiliar to communication engineers, but the mathematical details of the communication environment are complicated. In this talk, we present three examples to illustrate the current state of the field: for nanonetworking applications, we present the additive inverse Gaussian channel model; for biological applications, we discuss the information-theoretic capacity of intercellular signal transduction; and for experimental applications, we present a low-cost, easy-to-use platform to evaluate macroscale molecular communication. |
