Mondelli Group

Data Science, Machine Learning, and Information Theory

We are at the center of a revolution in information technology, with data being the most valuable commodity. Exploiting this exploding number of data sets requires to address complex inference problems, and the Mondelli group works to develop mathematically principled solutions.

These inference problems span different fields and arise in a variety of applications coming from engineering and natural sciences. In particular, the Mondelli group focuses on wireless communications and machine learning. In wireless communications, given a transmission channel, the goal is to send information encoded as a message while optimizing for certain metrics, such as complexity, reliability, latency, throughput, or bandwidth. In machine learning, given a model for the observations, the goal is to understand how many samples convey sufficient information to perform a certain task and what are the optimal ways to utilize such samples. Both the vision and the toolkit adopted by the Mondelli group are inspired by information theory, which leads to the investigation of the following fundamental questions: What is the minimal amount of information necessary to solve an assigned inference problem? Given this minimal amount of information, is it possible to design a low-complexity algorithm? What are the fundamental trade-offs between the parameters at play (e.g., dimensionality of the problem, size of the data sample, complexity)?