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The teaching language is English.

(P = may be included in postgraduate studies.)

             NEWS:

• Exam results (6.5.2004, 3.9.2004)
  

             (previous announcements may be found here )

0000000011111111
0000111100001111
0011001100110011
0101010101010101
0011110011000011
0101101010100101
0110011010011001

The 16 columns above are the codewords of the Hamming code of length 7. The first four coordinates contain the message bits, to which three redundant bits are appended. The code is one-error-correcting: an erroneous word with one bit-error can be corrected.

Even if the most important application of codes is without doubt error control in communication systems, they have many other applications. The aforementioned Hamming code is also a certain so-called covering code. It can, for example, be used to fill out 16 coupons in a lottery with seven questions and two alternatives per question to guarantee at least six correct answers on one of the coupons (compare this with 2 ⁷=128 coupons needed to cover all combinations).

This course gives an introduction to the theory of error control codes and the most important codes used in practice. Encoding and decoding algorithms are also considered. The topic of error control coding is mathematically oriented, and so is the course. Both block codes and convolutional codes are studied. At the end of the course, a wide variety of applications are surveyed, ranging from the compact disc (CD) to NASA space expeditions.

Earlier, this topic was taught in the course S-72.140 Information Theory and Coding Methods, which has now split into two courses: the current one and S-72.340 Information Theory. The current course naturally combines with S-72.340. The teaching language is English. The course may be included in postgraduate studies.

Requirements:

The course is carried out with an exam. The exam requirements are the content of the course book and the students ability to solve exercises given during the tutorials.
The exam is a closed-book exam with one compulsory task and four other task out of six given tasks.

Prerequisites:  S-72.060 , S-72.350, and  S-72.340 (more importantly: a good mathematical background - algebra, linear algebra - or a great interest in mathematics ).

Updated by Nikolai Nefedov 4-05-2004                   http://www.comlab.hut.fi/opetus/341/index.html