M460 Information and Coding Theory, Spring 2007

General Information

  1. Lectures Monday, Wednesday and Friday 9:00-9:50 pm in EE205
  2. Instructor: Anton Betten Weber 207
  3. Office hours: Monday 10-11am, Friday 8-9am.
  4. Contact details: phone 491 1865, email betten at math dot colostate dot edu
  5. Credits: 3

Prerequisites

M360, M369, ST321

Textbook

Error-Correcting Linear Codes, Classification by Isometry and Applications, A. Betten, M. Braun, H. Fripertinger, A. Kerber, A. Kohnert, A. Wassermann, Algorithms and Computation in Mathematics 18, Springer Berlin Heidelberg New York 2006. ISSN 1431-1550. ISBN-10 3-540-28371-4. ISBN-13 978-3-540-28371-3.

Homework and Quizzes

Homework will be assigned 5-7 times the semester and graded. Quizzes might appear sporadically.

Exams

There will be two midterms and one final exam. These will be held in the lecture room.
  1. Midterm 1: 2/14/07
  2. Midterm 2: postponed
  3. Final: during final's week, the exact date can be found at the registrar's website. It will not be published here.
There will be no make-up exams. If you have a conflict, you need to discuss the matter with the teacher well in advance.

Presentation

You are expected to give a short presentation (less that 25 minutes) sometime during the semester.

Grading Scheme

Your final grade will be determined from a score of 600. The midterms and the presentation count 100 points each, the final counts 200 points. The remaining 100 points are homework, quizzes and class activity.

Course Syllabus

The course is on the mathematical aspects of source and channel coding. The two parts will receive roughly the same attention in the course.
Part 1:
  1. Entropy and information, discrete sources etc.
  2. Kraft and McMillan inequalities,
  3. Noiseless coding theorem,
  4. Huffman codes,
  5. Shannon-Fano codes.
Part 2:
  1. Noisy coding, channel capacity, channel coding theorem,
  2. combinatorial bounds, weights, modifications,
  3. Linear codes, first examples.
  4. Hamming, Reed-Muller and MDS-codes,
  5. Cyclic codes, Reed-Solomon and BCH-codes,
  6. Goppa codes.
One extra word: the textbook covers only the second part of the course. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. The disadvantage is that the information theory part is not covered. The advantage is that the coding theory part is treated much more seriously than for instance in last year's textbook, which was roughly the same price but had much less in it (but a collection of more or less serious flaws). Since my teaching style is European, I tend to write all important results/definitions/etc. on the board. Please take this as an opportunity: In this course, you will learn in the classroom more than anywhere else. I will not swamp you with tons of handouts. I am aware that some students favor different teaching styles. Let's face it, I am only human, there is no such thing as the perfect teaching style.

Homework

assignment #1
assignment #2
assignment #3


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On 22 Mar 2007, 23:12.