Professor Neri Merhav

The Irving Shepard Academic Chair

Last update: June 12, 2024

Contact Information

Local Address
Room 670, A. Meyer Building, X4737 (merhav@ee)
Snail-Mail Address
Professor Neri Merhav
The Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Technion City, Haifa 3200003, Israel
Phone: +972-(4)-829-4737
Fax: +972-(4)-829-5757
Email: merhav AT ee DOT technion DOT ac DOT il

Biosketch

I received the B.Sc., M.Sc., and D.Sc. degrees from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in 1982, 1985, and 1988, respectively, all in electrical engineering. From 1988 to 1990 I was with AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA. Since 1990 I have been with the Electrical Engineering Department of the Technion. During 1994-2000, I was also serving as a consultant to the Hewlett-Packard Laboratories - Israel (HPL-I). During 1996-1999 and 2017-2020 I served as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, in the areas of Source Coding and Shannon Theory, respectively. Since 2004, I am also on the Editorial Board of Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory. My complete CV can be found here.

Areas of Interest

My general research interests include information theory, statistical communications, and statistical signal processing. In particular, I am interested in the areas of lossless and lossy source coding, sequential prediction of time-series, relationships between information theory and statistics, most notably, estimation, hypothesis testing, and universal decoding in situations of channel uncertainty. The latter includes also some work on error exponents. Other problem areas which I find interesting include Shannon Theory, in particular, Shannon-theoretic secrecy, joint source-channel coding, source/channel simulation, and coding with side information with applications to information hiding and watermarking systems as well as to biometric security. Some of these topics are also handled using the individual-sequence approach in information theory. Yet another recent research interest of mine concerns relationships between information theory and statistical physics.

Teaching

Courses I have been teaching:

Undergraduate Studies

044198 - Introduction to Digital Signal Processing

044202 - Random Signals

046201 - Introduction to Random-Signal Processing - see videotaped lectures in Youtube.

046205 - Introduction to Coding Theory

046206 - Introduction to Digital Communications

046242 - Statistical Physics, Fluctuations and Noise

046733 - Information Theory

Graduate Studies

048934 - Coded Communications

049043 - Universal Lossless Data Compression

049044 - Rate Distortion Theory, Lossy Compression, and Quantization

049054 - Statistical Physics and Information Theory

Publications ( copyright note)

My articles are in the following problem areas (some articles appear under more than one category):
Lossless Source Coding

Lossy Source Coding and Rate-Distortion Theory

Information-Theoretic Aspects of Digital Watermarking

Prediction and Sequential Decision Making

Universal Hypothesis Testing and Universal Decoding

Shannon Theory: Joint Source-Channel Coding, Data Processing Bounds, Guesswork, Secrecy, Mismatched Decoding, and Others

Information-Theoretic Aspects of Universal Simulation of Random Processes

Signal Processing, Detection/Estimation Theory, and Parameter Modulation-Estimation

Lempel-Ziv Complexity and the Individual-Sequence Approach to Information Theory

Exponential Error Bounds and Reliability Functions of Source Coding and Channel Coding

Information Theory and Statistical Physics

Information-Theoretic Aspects of Biometric Security

Data Processing in the Compressed Domain

Tutorials and Others

Selected talks

Graduate students

Google Scholar profile

My book. See also here.

Patents

Some of my recent drawings

My main accomplishment is the following (joint work with Ilana Merhav):

Reut, Hilla, and Roy Merhav - triplets, 31 years young.