Teaching an Old Code a New Trick

Tuesday, October 20, 2015 - 4:00pm to Wednesday, October 21, 2015 - 3:55pm

Event Calendar Category

LIDS Seminar Series

Speaker Name

Rudi Urbanke

Affiliation

EPFL

Building and Room Number

32-141

Our digital lives depend heavily on our ability to efficiently and reliably transmit information over long distances. It is therefore not surprising that much effort has been dedicated to devising clever schemes to accomplish this. I will go back in time to Reed-Muller codes, one of the pioneering codes discovered in the mid-fifties, and I will ask the question: "What do you get when you combine these classical algebraic codes, EXIT functions from iterative coding, and the fact that monotone symmetric Boolean functions have sharp thresholds?”

[Based on joint work with S. Kudekar, S. Kumar, M. Mondelli, H. D. Pfister, and E. Sasoglu]

This talk is joint with Theory of Computation.

R. Urbanke (Phd, WashU, St. Louis, 1995) has been obsessed with questions in coding theory for the past 20 years. He likes information theory, statistical physics, and graphical models. Before joining EPFL in 1999, he worked at Bell Labs (Murray Hill) at the Mathematics of Communications Group. He currently enjoys his sabbatical.