CIE Information Theory Society Young Researcher Awards

and Excellent PhD Dissertation Award

The Information Theory Society of Chinese Institute of Electronics (CIE) presented the “Young Rising Star Award” and “Excellent PhD Dissertation Award” in 2020. Dr. Hou Hanxu and Dr. Li Congduan of the Chapter won the “Young Rising Star Award” and Dr. Xing Jiongyue won the “Excellent PhD Dissertation Award”. Congratulations to all the winners.

Dr. Hanxu Hou

Hanxu Hou received the B.Eng. degree in information security from Xidian University, Xian, China, in 2010, and the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, in 2015, and from the School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Peking University. He is currently a specially-invited professor of Dongguan Institute of Technology, and a part-time researcher of Theory Lab, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. His research interests include coding for distributed storage systems, channel coding and network coding.

Dr. Hou received the award for his pioneering work in the field of distributed storage coding. With the advent of the era of big data, distributed storage is the mainstream storage method for storing massive data, and the core problem lies in how to guarantee the reliability and availability of data. Distributed storage coding is the kernel theory to solve the problem of data reliability and availability, consequently it has been highly concerned by the academic and industrial community. The theory has been successfully applied to distributed storage systems such as Huawei, Windows Azure and Facebook.

Dr. Congduan Li

Congduan Li received the B.S. degree from the University of Science and Technology Beijing, China, in 2008, the M.S. degree from Northern Arizona University in 2011, and Ph.D. degree from Drexel University in 2015, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. From Oct 2015 to Dec 2016, he was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Institute of Network Coding at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. From Dec 2016 to Aug 2018, he was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Computer Science at City University of Hong Kong. He is currently an associate professor in the School of Electronics and Communication Engineering at Sun Yat-sen University. His research interests lie in information theory and topics related to networks, such as coding, security, wireless, storage, and caching.

Dr. Li won the award for his contribution to the characterization of multi-source network coding rate region. The rapid development of modern communication technology is based on the basic research of information theory. Dr. Li focuses on the basic theories of communication systems, including network information theory and its applications in distributed storage, caching, wireless networks and social networks, with Shannon information theory and computer aided as the main research methods. At present, he has made momentous academic contributions to the research on the communication capacity limit, optimal coding, secure transmission capacity and optimal secure coding of multi-source and multi-sink communication systems.

Dr. Jiongyue Xing

Jiongyue Xing received the B.Sc. degree in Communication Engineering from Sun Yat-sen University, China, in 2015. From 2015 to 2020, he pursued the Ph.D. degree in Information and Communication Engineering from Sun Yat-sen University, under the supervision of Prof. Li Chen. From Dec. 2018 to Dec. 2019, he visited Prof. Martin Bossert at the Institute of Communication Engineering, Ulm University, Germany

His thesis is entitled “Algebraic Soft Decoding of Reed-Solomon Codes Based on Module and Dual Codewords ”, which focuses on low-complexity soft decoding of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes using module basis reduction (BR) technique and minimum-weight dual codewords. Based on the BR interpolation, the thesis utilizes re-encoding transform, progressive decoding and Chase decoding to propose several low-complexity and high-performance RS decoding algorithms, hoping to facilitate the industrial applications of the algebraic soft decoding. The thesis also introduces a novel shift-sum decoding scheme for the iterative decoding, which was grown during his visit of Prof. Bossert. This concept may bring some research topics on the soft decoding of RS codes.