题目： What is the best possible compression?
报告人：Tim Bell教授 新西兰坎特伯雷大学
地点：东五楼二楼210学术报告厅
时间：10月29日上午9：00

报告摘要：
　　Over the years many claims have been made of "optimal"compression, sometimes well intentioned, and sometimes to defraud investors.We will look at what is meant by "optimal", and how it can be measured andbounded. We will review the history of "best possible" methods, startingwith Huffman's " Minimum-Redundancy Codes", through to the "Near-Zero"compression system, which received investments of NZ$5.3 million (about25,000,000 RMB) but is yet to produce any results.

报告人简介：
　　Tim Bell is an Associate Professor in the department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, NewZealand. His current research interests include computer science education,computers and music, and compressed file searching. From 1999 to 2004 he was the Head of the Department of Computer Science at Canterbury.His “Computer Science Unplugged” project is widely used internationally,and its books and videos have been translated into about 12 languages. Hereceived the Science Communicator Award from the NZ Association of Scientistsin 1999, a University of Canterbury teaching award in 2001, an inaugural NewZealand Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award in 2002, and the University of Canterbury Teaching medal in 2008. The teaching medal was only the third awarded in the history of the university. He has appeared with his “Computer Science Unplugged” show at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, the Dunedin International Science Festival, and the Australian Science Festival.In the past his main area was data compression, and he has served as an expert witness in major US litigations about data compression. He is the author or co-author of about 70 journal and conference papers, and several books including “Text Compression” (Prentice Hall, 1990), “Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images” (Morgan Kaufmann, 1994, 1999), and “The Burrows-Wheeler Transform: data compression, suffix arrays, and pattern matching” (Springer, 2008).
　　He is a Guest Professor of Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China. He is also a qualified musician, and performs regularly on instruments that have black-and-white keyboards.