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12/2/2009Handouts
Handout describing the Gaussian channel has been posted. See 'Lecture notes and materials'

11/24/20098th Homework
Homework assignment #8 has been posted. This is the last homework before the final exam. Due date: 12/1/2009 @ 2:50pm.

11/17/2009Handout
Handout with the derivations of the BP algorithm has been posted. See 'Lecture notes and materials'

11/12/20097th Homework
Homework assignment #7 has been posted. Due date: 11/19/2009 @ 2:50pm.

Course Materials

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Books

There are many good textbooks covering the concepts of coding theory (both modern and algebraic). Different parts of the course will be based on different textbooks. We will use the following book most often:

David J. C. MacKay, Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms
This book is available in PDF for on-screen viewing.

If you find this book interesting (which I hope you will), you can buy a hard copy version.

You can find more information about this book at http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html

If you are decidign between buying a book about Harry Potter or this book, consider this comparison.

You can also search this book on Google books.

Download:  whole book (11MB) or individual chapters.

Other books that are related to our course are:
  • Raymond Hill, A First Course in Coding Theory We will use this book for short period of time to review the basics of linear codes. This book will be put on reserve in the library so that you can make copies of few (2-3) chapters.
  • Tom Richardson and Ruediger Urbanke, Modern Coding Theory Very nice (although quite technical) book. For those students who really would like to understand the subject.

Matlab

This course should give you some practical hands-on experience with the modern way of coding information over noisy channels. We will use Matlab to run simulations and you will be asked to implement some of the algorithms in your homework assignments. From this reason, I assume you are familiar with Matlab, so that you can concentrate more on the course main topic. If you are not familiar with this language, please spend enough time by reviewing the Matlab tutorials from
The following document is highly recommended