SYSU International Workshop on Mathematics and Coding
The Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU) International Workshop on Mathematics and Coding went well during Dec. 2-3 in the University’s Guangzhou South Campus. This workshop was organized by the University and the IEEE Information Theory Society Guangzhou Chapter. More than 80 scholars and industrial partners from mainland China participated the workshop onsite, and more than 50 oversea scholars participated online due to travel restrictions.
Information coding is the key for modern communications, and coding is founded on mathematics. For example, classic channel codes were founded on linear algebra, while modern channel codes had been facilitated by probability and graph theories. The understanding of network coding requires both linear algebra and graph theory. This workshop aims to look back at the mathematics that we have used for designing and practicing codes, so that we can better look forward. It is also hoped that such an event can provide an opportunity for scholars at home and abroad to exchange knowledge and establish collaborations. Pingzhi Fan and Li Chen are the co-chairs of the workshop. The two-day workshop spanned four sessions chaired by Li Chen, Pingzhi Fan, Baoming Bai, and Bazhong Shen, respectively.
The workshop invited fifteen talks. In the morning session of Dec. 2, Alexander Barg of University of Maryland presented his recent results on Stolarsky’s invariance principle for the Hamming space and energy maximization. Jun Chen of McMaster University introduced the duality between Slepian-Wolf coding and channel coding. Li Chen of Sun Yat-sen University presented his recent comprehension on the Gröbner bases in decoding of Reed-Solomon codes, and Paul Siegel of University of California, San Diego, showed the coding technique for efficient DNA synthesis. The afternoon session of the day started with the talk of Erdal Arıkan of Bilkent University, which focused on the polarization adjusted convolutional (PAC) codes. Martin Bossert of Ulm University then presented the information set decoding of BCH codes over binary symmetric channel. The last talk of the day was presented by Bob Li of University of Electronic Science and Technology, China, who gave an intuitive explanation on the commutative algebra in network coding.
In the morning session of Dec. 3, Frank Kschischang of University of Toronto presented the art and some recent results of zipper codes. Dmitry Trukhachev of Dalhousie University introduced braided block codes, and its structural relation to zipper codes. Hamid Ebrahimzad of Huawei later introduced concatenated polar-zipper codes for optical communications. The last talk of the morning session was given by Kai Niu of Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, who showed his recent work on characterizing the polar spectrum. The afternoon session of the day started with the talk of Peter Trifonov of Saint Petersburg Polytechnic University, which focused on the trellises, BCH codes, finite fields and successive cancellation decoding. Pingyi Fan of Tsinghua University then presented interpretable generative adversarial networks with exponential function. Fangwei Fu of Nankai University presented optimal cyclic (r, δ) locally repairable codes with unbounded length. The last talk of the workshop was given by Raymond Leung of Huawei, who unwrapped more possibilities by pointing out that coding is not only mathematics.
This has been a successful workshop, especially in face of the pandemic challenge, its hybrid model has tested a new way of conferencing and proliferating research in information theory and coding. The Guangzhou Chapter continues its mission on serving its research community.
