Abstract
Consider a situation in which multiple terminals observe separate but correlated signals. In a multiterminal data compression problem, a la the classic work of Slepian and Wolf, each terminal seeks to acquire the signals observed by all the other terminals by means of efficiently compressed interterminal communication. This problem does not involve any secrecy constraints. On the other hand, in a secret key generation problem, the same terminals seek to devise a “common secret key” through public communication, which can be observed by an eavesdropper, in such a way that the key is concealed from the eavesdropper. Such a secret key can be used for subsequent encryption. We explain the innate connections that exist between these two problems and explore a constructive approach to secret key generation based on muliterminal data compression techniques. This talk is based on joint work with Imre Csiszar and Chunxuan Ye.

Biography
Prakash Narayan received the Bachelor of Technology degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1976, and the M.S. and D.Sc. degrees in Systems Science and Mathematics, and Electrical Engineering, respectively, from Washington University, St. Louis, MO., in 1978 and 1981. He is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, with a joint appointment at the Institute for Systems Research. He is also a founding member of the Center for Satellite and Hybrid Communication Networks, a NASA Commercial Space Center. He has held visiting appointments at ETH, Zurich; the Technion, Haifa; the Renyi Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest; the University of Bielefeld; the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (formerly LADSEB), Padova; and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Dr. Narayan has served as Associate Editor for Shannon Theory for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory; Co-Organizer of the IEEE Workshop on Multi-User Information Theory and Systems, VA (1983); Technical Program Chair of the IEEE/IMS Workshop on Information Theory and Statistics, VA (1994); General Co-Chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, Washington, D.C. (2001); and Technical Program Co-Chair of the IEEE Information Theory Workshop, Bangalore (2002). He is a Fellow of the IEEE.