This Institutional Infrastructure award to Northeastern University is for the development of a networked environment of powerful workstations and servers linking the College of Computer Science and the Digital Signal Processing group in the College of Engineering. The infrastructure supports research in a number of areas, many of them collaborative. CDMA for mobile communications involves several activities including the design of pseudorandom sequences for minimizing communication interference, the design of efficient CPM signals with trellis coding, and determining the fundamental limits on the capacity of multiple user mobile channels. Research on neural nets involves both architectures for neural nets and learning algorithms. Communication network research involves studying protocols for communications in high speed LANs and MANs, bridging LANs, and packet radio networks. Research on more mathematical topics includes computational algebra and algebraic models for compiler correctness. Digital signal processing research involves studies of hearing, high order spectra, image processing, adaptive signal processing methods, and joint source coding theory. Signal processing is a natural collaborative area for computer scientists and electrical engineers. The replacement of analog techniques by digital techniques requires a much more intensive use of computation in order to interpret communications. The research supported by this infrastructure grant includes work on how to make local networks communications well amongst themselves and other networks, the development of new algorithms to get rid of noise and to optimize the information carrying capacity of communications links, the development of algorithms that will allow networks of computers to work the same way as cellular phone networks, and more theoretical work in studying the mathematical underpinnings of learning, algebra, and compilers.
