CIF: Small: Collaborative Research: A software toolbox for computing and exploring the fundamental limits of information systems

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This project aims to build an open-source software toolbox under the GNU-GPL license to facilitate the investigation of information systems (e.g., data storage systems, streaming data structures, and content delivery systems) using information theoretical methods, more precisely, to facilitate the derivation of outer bounds and identifying novel code constructions. By building modern software tools which are able to take advantage of the advance in computer hardware and software, this effort can help the community more efficiently incorporate computational intelligence into information theoretic research. The main theoretical foundation for the approach is the entropy linear programming framework, and techniques based on symmetry and implication relations that can reduce the complexity of such programs. The core components of the toolbox are various software tools to perform information theoretic analysis and exploration of information systems in a computational manner. The completion of such a toolbox can enable researchers to build, with minimal programming efforts, computer software which takes in a description of the information system of interest, processes the relation among its components, formulates an appropriate optimization problem, and invokes a computational optimization solver to produce meaningful results regarding the fundamental limits and code constructions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.