后香农时代ICT领域的十大挑战问题

Ten key ICT challenges in the post-Shannon era

本文以未来万物互联的智能社会的愿景为出发点,从信息产生、传输和处理的角度,深入剖析信息通信(information and communications technologies,ICT)行业在信息论、运筹学、控制论、计算理论和人工智能方面未来发展中面临的技术挑战,并提出十个重要挑战问题.文章首先详细阐述这些技术挑战问题的背景、问题定义以及学术界和工业界当前的研究进展.其次针对这些问题给出潜在的解决思路和未来的研究方向.最后提出要解决十大挑战难题所面临的理论突破机会,包括:需要超越经典的香农信息论,建立语义信息论体系;需要突破深度神经网络,建立可解释的深度神经网络理论体系;需要突破经典的排队论和优化理论体系,建立网络排队论和网络优化理论方法;需要突破功耗和复杂度的约束,建立近似计算理论体系.

Considering the vision of building a fully connected,intelligent world,this paper investigates the technological challenges and proposes ten key challenges that the information and communications technologies(ICT)industry is facing from the perspectives of the generation,transmission,and processing of information.These challenges cover the subjects of information theory,operational research,control theory,computational theory,and artificial intelligence.The paper first discusses the backgrounds of these ten challenges and their definitions,and offers the literature reviews of the current research.Then,it presents the potential methods for solving these problems as well as the future research directions.Finally,the paper introduces the opportunities for making theoretical breakthroughs in order to solve these problems,including the following:Transcending the Shannon information theory to build a framework of semantic information theory;building a theoretical framework to improve the explainability of deep neural networks;overcoming the challenges of the traditional queuing theory and optimization theory related to solving networking problems,and developing new theories such as network queuing theory and network optimization theory;and overcoming the constraints of power consumption and complexity to build a theoretical framework for approximate computing.