Abstract: The famous Shannon-Nyquist theorem has become a landmark in the development of digital signal and image processing. However, in many modern applications, the signal bandwidths have increased tremendously, while the acquisition capabilities have not scaled sufficiently fast. Consequently, conversion to digital has become a serious bottleneck. Furthermore, the resulting digital data requires storage, communication and processing at very high rates which is computationally expensive and requires large amounts of power. In the context of medical imaging sampling at high rates often translates to high radiation dosages, increased scanning times, bulky medical devices, and limited resolution.
In this talk, we present a framework for sampling and processing a large class of wideband analog signals at rates far below Nyquist in space, time and frequency, which allows to dramatically reduce the number of antennas, sampling rates and band occupancy. Our framework relies on exploiting signal structure and the processing task. We consider applications of these concepts to a variety of problems in communications, radar and ultrasound imaging and show several demos of real-time sub-Nyquist prototypes including a wireless ultrasound probe, sub-Nyquist MIMO radar, super-resolution in microscopy and ultrasound, cognitive radio, and joint radar and communication systems. We then discuss how the ideas of exploiting the task, structure and model can be used to develop interpretable model-based deep learning methods that can adapt to existing structure and are trained from small amounts of data. These networks achieve a more favorable trade-off between increase in parameters and data and improvement in performance, while remaining interpretable.
Yonina Eldar is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel. She was previously a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Technion, where she held the Edwards Chair in Engineering. She is also a Visiting Professor at MIT, a Visiting Scientist at the Broad Institute, and an Adjunct Professor at Duke University and was a Visiting Professor at Stanford. She received the B.Sc. degree in physics and the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering both from Tel-Aviv University (TAU), Tel-Aviv, Israel, in 1995 and 1996, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, in 2002. She is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, an IEEE Fellow and a EURASIP Fellow. She has received many awards for excellence in research and teaching, including the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award (2013), the IEEE/AESS Fred Nathanson Memorial Radar Award (2014) and the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award (2016). She was a Horev Fellow of the Leaders in Science and Technology program at the Technion and an Alon Fellow. She received the Michael Bruno Memorial Award from the Rothschild Foundation, the Weizmann Prize for Exact Sciences, the Wolf Foundation Krill Prize for Excellence in Scientific Research, the Henry Taub Prize for Excellence in Research (twice), the Hershel Rich Innovation Award (three times), the Award for Women with Distinguished Contributions, the Andre and Bella Meyer Lectureship, the Career Development Chair at the Technion, the Muriel & David Jacknow Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Technion’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (two times). She received several best paper awards and best demo awards together with her research students and colleagues, was selected as one of the 50 most influential women in Israel, and was a member of the Israel Committee for Higher Education. She is the Editor in Chief of Foundations and Trends in Signal Processing and a member of several IEEE Technical Committees and Award Committees.