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ARE THERE TURBO-CODES ON MARS

PROF. BOB McELIECE (California Institute of Technology)Abstract:When the first close-up pictures of Mars were transmitted to Earth by NASA's Mariner 4 spacecraft in 1965, the data rate was less than 10 bits per second. By comparison, the current Mars Exploration Rover (Spirit and Opportunity) mission transmits images to earth at over 100,000 bits per second. What underlies this astonishing engineering improvement? Dr. Robert McEliece will argue that it is Newtonian physics and Shannon's information theory, in almost equal parts.Bio:Robert J. McEliece received B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1964 and 1967, respectively. From 1963 to 1978, he worked at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he has been a consultant at JPL since 1978. From 1978 to 1982, he was Professor of Mathematics and Research Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Since 1982, he has been on the faculty at Caltech, where he is now the Allen E. Puckett Professor and Professor of Electrical Engineering. At JPL, Dr. McEliece and his students have contributed to the design and analysis of many coded interplanetary telecommunication systems, for example the Golay coded non-imaging system for the Voyager spacecraft, and the ``Big Viterbi Decoder'' which has been used on the Galileo, Mars Pathfinder, and Mars Exploration Rover Missions. Dr. McEliece is the author of three textbooks and more than 250 research articles, jointly with more than 100 coauthors. Among his research accomplishments are "McEliece's Theorem," on weight divisibility in cyclic codes, the "JPL Bound" (jointly with Rodemich, Rumsey, and Welch), which has been the world record-holder in a basic combinatorial problem of coding since 1977, the ``McEliece public-key cryptosystem,'' which has withstood the attacks of cryptanalysts for more than 25 years, and "repeat-accumulate codes" (jointly with Dariush Divsalar and Hui Jin), which bridge the gap between turbo-codes and LDPC codes. Dr. McEliece is a member of the American Mathematical Society, a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. His Erdos number is One.Host: Prof. Solomon Golomb, x07333 ***A reception will follow the seminar at 4:00p.m.

Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - ontology Auditorium (GER-124)

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Rosine Sarafian