Guest Lecture on Coding

Guest Lecture on Coding

The basic problem of coding theory is that of communication over an unreliable channel that results in errors in the transmitted message. It is worthwhile noting that all communication channels have errors, and thus codes are widely used. In fact, they are not just used for network communication, USB channels, satellite communication and so on, but also in disks and other physical media which are also prone to errors. In addition to their practical application, coding theory has many applications in the theory of computer science. As such it is a topic that is of interest to both practitioners and theoreticians.

Error-correcting codes play an important role in many areas of science and engineering. This course is a graduate level introduction to error-correcting codes, with a focus on the theoretical and algorithmic aspects arising in the context of the “channel coding” problem: We want to transmit data over a noisy communication channel so that the receiver can recover the correct data despite the adverse effects of the channel.