The Genesis of Coding Theory

Daniel Costello
Bettex Chair, Professor Emeritus
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Notre Dame

Host Alexander Barg

Abstract
This talk gives an historical overview of the field of channel coding dating back to the work of Shannon in 1948. The major advances in coding theory since 1948 are viewed from a common perspective: the power and bandwidth efficiencies needed to achieve a targeted level of performance. The most important contributions in coding over the last 60 plus years are highlighted, including Hamming codes, Reed-Muller codes, Reed-Solomon codes, convolutional codes, soft decision decoding, trellis coded modulation, multilevel coding, concatenated codes, turbo codes, low-density parity-check codes, spatially coupled codes, polar codes, and iterative decoding. Finally, areas of potential future research in channel coding are briefly discussed.

Biography
Daniel J. Costello, Jr. received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 1969. Since 1985, he has been a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Notre Dame and from 1989 to 1998 served as Chair of the Department. In 2000, he was named the Leonard Bettex Professor of Electrical Engineering.

Dr. Costello has been a member of IEEE since 1969 and was elected Fellow in 1985. In 2000, the IEEE Information Theory Society selected him as a recipient of a Third-Millennium Medal, and he was a co-recipient of the 2009 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award and the 2012 ComSoc & Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award.

Dr. Costello's research interests are in the area of digital communications, with emphasis on error control coding and coded modulation. He has numerous technical publications in his field, and in 1983 he co-authored a textbook entitled "Error Control Coding: Fundamentals and Applications", the 2nd edition of which was published in 2004.