EE Seminar: Capacity of Frequency-based Channels: Encoding Information in Molecular Concentrations

הרישום לסמינר יבוצע בתחילת הסמינר באמצעות סריקת הברקוד למודל (יש להיכנס לפני כן למודל,  לא באמצעות האפליקציה)

Registration to the seminar is done at the beginning of the seminar by scanning the barcode for the Moodle (Please enter ahead to the Moodle, NOT by application)

(The talk will be given in English)

Speaker:     Prof. Nir Weinberger

Technion

Monday, April 20^th, 2026

13:00 - 14:00

Capacity of Frequency-based Channels: Encoding Information in Molecular Concentrations

Abstract

We consider a molecular channel, in which messages are encoded to the frequency of objects (or concentration of molecules) in a pool, and whose output during reading time is a noisy version of the input frequencies, as obtained by sampling with replacement from the pool. We tightly characterize the capacity of this channel using upper and lower bounds, when the number of objects in the pool of objects is constrained. We apply this result to the DNA storage channel in the short-molecule regime, and show that even though the capacity of this channel is technically zero, it can still achieve a large information density.

Short Bio

Nir Weinberger is an associate Professor at the The Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technion - Israel Institute ofTechnology. Previously, from 2017 to 2018 he was a post-doctoral fellow at Tel-Aviv University, and from 2018-2020 he was a Technion-MIT post-doctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. He has received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel, in 2006 and 2009, respectively, and his Ph.D.degree in 2017, from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. Previously, he also worked as an algorithm Engineer, specializing in Digital Communications and Signal Processing.