Recent Advances in Polar Codes

Prof. Henry D. Pfister

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Department of Mathematics
Duke University

Abstract:

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Recently, the performance of successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding, for certain short polar codes, has been observed to approach the random coding union bound. This remarkable performance is based on combining a few recent advances: SCL decoding, dynamic frozen bits, and a careful choice of frozen positions. The idea of combining an outer cyclic redundancy check (CRC) code with SCL decoding was introduced by Tal and Vardy in 2011. Later, Trifonov and Miloslavkaya generalized this idea and introduced polar subcodes and dynamic frozen bits in 2015. Then, Arikan's introduction of Polarization Assisted Convolutional (PAC) codes in 2019 combined these to achieve excellent performance. Finally, we consider very recent work that analyzes the list-size required for SCL decoding to approach MAP performance.

Biography:

Henry D. Pfister received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2003 from the University of California, San Diego and is currently a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Duke University with a secondary appointment in Mathematics. Prior to that, he was an associate professor at Texas A&M University (2006-2014), a post-doctoral fellow at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (2005-2006), and a senior engineer at Qualcomm Corporate R&D in San Diego (2003-2004). His current research interests include information theory, error-correcting codes, quantum computing, and machine learning.

He received the NSF Career Award in 2008 and a Texas A&M ECE Department Outstanding Professor Award in 2010. He is a coauthor of the 2007 IEEE COMSOC best paper in Signal Processing and Coding for Data Storage and a coauthor of a 2016 Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC) best paper. He has served the IEEE Information Theory Society as a member of the Board of Governors (2019-2022), an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2013-2016), and a Distinguished Lecturer (2015-2016). He was also the General Chair of the 2016 North American School of Information Theory.