Michael Luby, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Digital Fountain

Foutain codes are a new class of FEC codes that provide flexibility, efficiency, scalability and simplicity that goes far beyond what is possible with LDPC codes. Like fixed-rate irregular LDPC codes, fountain codes provably and practically achieve channel capacity for the binary erasure channel, and come close to achieving channel capacity for error channels such as the AWGN channel. On the other hand, fountain codes are not fixed-rate codes, and instead allow the efficient generation of as many encoding symbols as desired on the fly. Fountain codes are proving to have a wide variety of applications, including providing high quality and efficient streaming and file broadcast delivery over commercial cellular networks, enabling delivery of high quality HDTV streaming over IP networks iwth fast channel zapping capabilities, and a variety of military applications. This talk will describe the theory and some of the applicability of the most advanced forms of fountain codes available today.

Michael Luby is a world-renowned scientist, making significant contributions in the areas of coding theory, randomized algorithm design and analysis, networking protocols and cryptography. Prior to founding Digital Fountain, he was a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto and the University of California at Berkeley, where he also led the Theory Group at the International Computer Science Institute. He is the inventor of Luby Transform (LT) codes, the unique breakthrough technology upon which the Digital Fountain products are based. He received his PhD in Theoretical Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983.