The celebrated theorem of Slepian and Wolf describes the rates needed in order for separate encoders to losslessly compress correlated sources without cooperating. The quadratic Gaussian analogue of this problem is of interest due to its applicability to analog sources and has been open since the 1970's. I will show that a simple ``layered'' compression architecture is optimal when there are two encoders and thereby complete the determination of the rate region in this case. Some results will also be given for more general sources and distortion measures.

This is joint work with Venkat Anantharam, Saurabh Tavildar, and Pramod Viswanath.

Aaron Wagner is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (B.S.E., 1999) and the University of California, Berkeley (M.S, 2003; Ph.D., 2005).

He has received the David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize from the U.C. Berkeley EECS Department (2006), the Bernard Friedman Memorial Prize in Applied Mathematics from the U.C. Berkeley Math Department (2005), and a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation (1999).