Information Theory

Course objectives:

This course will cover the basic questions of information theory as
well as applications of information theory in computer science. It
will cover the following topics:

  • Shannon theory:

    • – Data compression
    • – Channel coding
    • – Applications of entropies in computer science
    • Error correcting codes:

      • – Linear codes
      • – Reed-Solomon codes
      • – Capacity achieving codes with efficient encoding and decoding

    Pre-requisites

    Familiarity with basic probability and linear algebra. The necessary background for finite fields will be introduced.

    References

    1. Cover and Thomas, Elements of Information Theory
    2. Guruswami, Rudra and Sudan, Essential Coding Theory

    See the course website, and the webpage for the TDs.