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

该项目旨在建立一个GNU-GPL许可下的开源软件工具箱，以促进信息系统的调查（例如，数据存储系统、流数据结构和内容传递系统），更准确地说，使用信息理论方法来促进外部边界的导出和识别新颖的代码构造。 通过构建能够利用计算机硬件和软件进步的现代软件工具，这一努力可以帮助社区更有效地将计算智能纳入信息理论研究。该方法的主要理论基础是熵线性规划框架，以及基于对称和蕴涵关系的技术，可以降低此类程序的复杂性。工具箱的核心组件是各种软件工具，以计算方式执行信息系统的信息理论分析和探索。完成这样一个工具箱可以使研究人员能够以最少的编程工作来构建计算机软件，该软件接受感兴趣的信息系统的描述，处理其组件之间的关系，制定适当的优化问题，并调用一个计算优化求解器，以产生有关基本限制和代码结构的有意义的结果。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，认为值得支持。

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.