Universal Semantic Communication

Madhu Sudan (Harvard)

Abstract: I will briefly describe some previous work in which we tried to mathematically capture "understanding" and "misunderstanding" in communication, in extreme settings including communicating with say aliens. Part of the goal is to explain how languages may be learned by communication, or more generally how to use communication to learn to communicate.

Based on joint works with Brendan Juba (Washington U.) and Oded Goldreich (Weizmann).