The modern approach to coding, using codes defined by large sparse graphical models jointly with iterative decoding algorithms, has had a significant impact on both the theory as well as the practice of coding.

One difficulty in the modern approach, however, is that for a user who is not interested in coding per se but only wants to choose a good code for his application it is in general not easy to do so. Whereas in classical coding classes of codes are known that cover a large range of parameters and tables for various parameters have been published, no such tool currently exists in the iterative decoding realm.

Dr. Urbanke will discuss how the asymptotic (in the blocklength) theory combined with a scaling approach might help filling this gap. He will present what is known, what still needs to be done, and what might be expected from such an approach.

[This is joint work with A. Amraoui, J. Ezri, A. Montanari, and T. Richardson.]
 

About the Speaker

Rüdiger L. Urbanke received the Diplomingenieur degree from the Vienna Institute of Technology, Vienna, Austria, in 1990 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Washington University, St. Louis, MO,in 1992 and 1995 respectively.

From 1995 to 1999, he held a position at the Mathematics of Communications Department at Bell Labs. Since November 1999, he has been a faculty member at the School of Computer & Communication Sciences of EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Dr. Urbanke is a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship. 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." He is a co-recipient of the IEEE Information Theory Society 2002 Best Paper Award and the co-author (jointly with Tom Richardson) on an upcoming book entitled "Modern Coding Theory."