Introduction
Instructor: Dan Spielman
Where: room 1-115.
When: Tuesday and Thursday from 2:30 to 4:00.
Dan's Office Hours: to be determined
The field of Error-Correcting Codes has been revolutionized
in the last decade by the emergence of iterative decoding
techniques.
Surprisingly, these techniques are elementary and rely little
on the more sophisticated tools developed in the field
in recent decades.
While the results that sparked this revolution were purely
experimental,
analytical techniques have been developed that partially explain,
and more importantly predict, the
behavior of iterative decoding algorithms.
This course will introduce students to iterative decoding
algorithms and the codes to which they are applied,
including Turbo Codes, Low-Density Parity-Check Codes,
and Serially-Concatenated Codes.
The course will begin with an introduction to the fundamental
problems of Coding Theory and their mathematical
formulations.
This will be followed by a study of Belief Propagation--the
probabilistic heuristic which underlies iterative decoding
algorithms.
Belief Propagation will then be applied to the decoding of
Turbo, LDPC, and Serially-Concatenated codes.
The technical portion of the course will conclude with
a study of tools for explaining and predicting
the behavior of iterative decoding algorithms, including
EXIT charts and Density Evolution.
We will see how these predictive tools can be used to aid
code design.
While students are working on finishing their final projects,
lectures will focus on presentation techniques while
covering material of interest that is not required
for the final projects.
All work in the class will be project-based.
These projects will involve computer experiments.
Students may use any computing environment they like,
but are recommended to work in C, Java or Matlab as these
are the languages with which the instructor is most familiar.
As some of these projects will involve experiments that will
run for hours or days, students are advised to start early
or buy large supercomputers.
Dan Spielman
Last modified: Wed Jan 28 17:10:37 EST 2004