[Colloquium] 3/10 Talks at TTIC: Mary Wootters, CMU

[Mary Marre]

When:     Thursday, March 10th at 11:00 am

Where:    TTIC, 6045 S Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room 526

Who:       Mary Wootters, CMU

Title:       Reed-Solomon Codes: from Theory to Practice.


Abstract:
Error correcting codes are an important tool, which allow for communication
in the presence of noise.  In this talk, I'll highlight one family of error
correcting codes, called Reed-Solomon (RS) codes.  These codes, based on
polynomials over finite fields, have been around since the 1960's, but are
still a fruitful research area!  I'll give three examples of how RS codes
have come up in my research.  These three ways run the gamut from theory to
practice.  The first way, on the very theoretical end, is a combinatorial
problem called list decoding, which has motivations in complexity theory.
The second way, a bit more down-to-earth, has to do with designing schemes
for distributed storage: how do we store a file on several servers
robustly?  The third way, on the practical side of things, is combinatorial
group testing: in our work we collaborated with computational biologists to
design better algorithms for high-throughput genetic screening and de novo
genome sequencing.  Punchlines include progress on a long-standing open
problem about the list-decodability of RS codes; improved ways to use RS
codes as regenerating codes for distributed storage; and improved
algorithms, based on RS codes, in high-throughput genetic screening and de
novo sequencing.


Host: Julia Chuzhoy, cjulia at ttic.edu



Mary C. Marre
Administrative Assistant
*Toyota Technological Institute*
*6045 S. Kenwood Avenue*
*Room 504*
*Chicago, IL  60637*
*p:(773) 834-1757*
*f: (773) 357-6970*
*mmarre at ttic.edu <mmarre at ttic.edu>*
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