Comms-IT Seminar: Recent Advances in Channel Coding

Wednesday, November 1, 2017 - 1:30pm

Event Calendar Category

Uncategorized

Speaker Name

Hamed Hassani

Affiliation

University of Pennsylvania

Building and Room number

36- 428

Abstract

Since Shannon's 1948 landmark paper, the main focus of coding theory has been to achieve capacity in the asymptotic sense: design low-complexity codes that become reliable at rates approaching capacity in the limit of large blocklengths. Throughout the seven decades of the development of coding theory, we have witnessed many remarkable code designs. Today, we have two families of low-complexity codes that can asymptotically achieve capacity for a wide range of channels: polar codes and spatially coupled codes.

In this talk, I will consider two practically significant questions that have emerged in recent years as the new grand challenges in coding theory: non-asymptotic optimality and universality. I will explain why the performance of the state-of-the-art code designs are unsatisfactory with respect to each of these challenges. I will then discuss new promising ways for improving the current codes as well as new coding paradigms to address these challenges.

Biography

Hamed Hassani is currently an assistant professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering department at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to that, he was a research fellow at Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing (UC Berkeley), and a post-doctoral researcher in the Computer Science department at ETH Zurich. He received a Ph.D. degree in Computer and Communication Sciences from EPFL, Lausanne. Hamed's fields of interest include coding and information theory, machine learning as well as theory and applications of graphical models. He is the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Information Theory Society Thomas M. Cover Dissertation Award. His co-authored paper at ISIT 2015 received the IEEE Jack Keil Wolf ISIT Student Paper Award.