Research Seminar: "Systematic Function-Correcting Codes" by Prof. Antonia Wachter-Zeh

Spring 2022 SIP Seminar Series: March 22, 2022
[www.inspirelab.us/seminars/]
Speaker: Prof. Antonia Wachter-Zeh
Abstract: In this talk, we study function-correcting codes, a new class of codes designed to protect the function evaluation of a message against errors. We show that function-correcting codes are equivalent to irregular-distance codes, i.e., codes that obey some given distance requirement between each pair of codewords. Using these connections, we study irregular-distance codes and derive general upper and lower bounds on their optimal redundancy. Since these bounds heavily depend on the specific function, we provide simplified, suboptimal bounds that are easier to evaluate. We further employ our general results to specific functions of interest and compare our results to standard error-correcting codes which protect the whole message.
(Joint work with Andreas Lenz, Rawad Bitar and Eitan Yaakobi)
Biography: Antonia Wachter-Zeh is an Associate Professor at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Munich, Germany in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She received the M.Sc. degree in communications technology in 2009 from Ulm University, Germany. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in 2013 from Ulm University and from Universite de Rennes 1, Rennes, France. From 2013 to 2016, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, and from 2016 to 2020 a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at TUM. She is a recipient of the DFG Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Preis and of an ERC Starting Grant. She is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Her research interests are coding theory, cryptography and information theory and their application to storage, communications, privacy, and security.