Reed-Muller Codes — An Oldie but Goodie

Rüdiger Urbanke
Professor, EPFL
Given on: May 28th, 2015
Venue: Packard 101
Time: 4:15pm to 5:15pm

Abstract

Reed-Muller codes are among the oldest and best studied families of codes. They have many beautiful and useful properties. Recently they have drawn renewed interest due to their close relationship with Polar codes. This begs the question: Do they achieve capacity?

Based on joint work with S. Kudekar, M. Mondelli, and E. Sasoglu.

Biography

Rüdiger L. Urbanke obtained his Dipl. Ing. degree from the Vienna University of Technology, Austria in 1990 and the M.Sc. and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, MO, in 1992 and 1995, respectively.

He held a position at the Mathematics of Communications Department at Bell Labs from 1995 till 1999 before becoming a faculty member at the School of Computer & Communication Sciences (I&C) of EPFL. He is a member of the Information Processing Group.

He is principally interested in the analysis and design of iterative coding schemes, which allow reliable transmission close to theoretical limits at low complexities. Such schemes are part of most modern communications standards, including wireless transmission, optical communication and hard disk storage. More broadly, his research focuses on the analysis of graphical models and the application of methods from statistical physics to problems in communications.

From 2000-2004 he was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and he is currently on the board of the series “Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory.” Since 2013 he has been a Member of the Board of the Information Theory Society as well as a Distinguished Speaker. From 2009 till 2012 he was the head of the I&C doctoral school and in 2013 he served as Dean a. i. of I&C. Dr. Urbanke is a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship. He is a co-author of the book “Modern Coding Theory” published by Cambridge University Press a co-recipient of the 2002 and the 2013 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award, the 2011 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award, as well as the 2014 IEEE Hamming Medal.