Associate professor Alp Bassa visits the algebra group

Associate professor Alp Bassa from Bogazici University, Istanbul, will visit the algebra group this week. He will work with Peter Beelen on Drinfeld modular polynomials, which have applications in the theory of asymptotically good, recursively defined towers of function fields. Such towers in turn are used to produce excellent error-correcting codes.

Prasant Singh, who will very soon defend his Ph.D. thesis in IIT Bombay, has recently been offered a H.C.Ørsted-postdoc position in the algebra group. Yesterday, he has accepted the offer. He will start his work at DTU on November 15. We are happy to welcome him into the team!

Prasant’s project deals with the investigation of Grassmann codes, codes constructed from Grassmann varieties. These highly algebraic codes exhibit a structure akin to the highly successful class of LDPC codes, which makes it possible to decode Grassmann codes using LDPC-decoding inspired methods. Last year master student Jesper Gielov Olsen demonstrated in his master project, that this decoder performs very well experimentally. Prasant will study theoretical properties of Grassmann and related codes as well as their decoding more fully.

Professor S.R. Ghorpade from IIT Bombay will visit the algebra group 4-14 June. He has visited DTU several times before and has published several articles together with the algebra group. We are looking forward to welcoming him at DTU soon!

Update to the post from January 25: Both submissions to International Symposium in Information Theory 2017 have been accepted! The papers are:

• Twisted Reed-Solomon Codes, Sven Puchinger, Johan Rosenkilde, Peter Beelen. arXiv pre-print.

• Decoding of Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code using Improved Power Decoding, Sven Puchinger, Johan Rosenkilde. arXiv pre-print.

Postdoc Vincent Neiger just got a paper accepted in the prestigious Journal of Complexity. The paper, with the title “Fast, deterministic computation of the Hermite normal form and determinant of a polynomial matrix” is coauthored with George Labahn and Wei Zhou. In the paper a fast and deterministic algorithms is given to compute the determinant and Hermite normal form of a nonsingular square matrix of univariate polynomial over a field.

A preprint of the paper can be found here.

Maria Montanucci a Ph.D. student in Mathematics at Università degli Studi della Basilicata (Potenza, Italy) will visit the algebra group from 1 April – 31 May. Her advisior is Prof. Gábor Korchmáros who has done excellent work in the theory of algebraic curves in positive characteristic. Maria obtained her Master degree in 2015 at Università degli Studi di Perugia under the supervision of Prof. Massimo Giulietti, another leading expert in the theory of algebraic curves. We look forward to her visit.

The coming three weeks the algebra group will be host for guest Ph.D. student Élise Barelli. She is part of the project team Grace at Inria Saclay, France. Her supervisor is Alain Couvreur, who has visited the algebra group in the past.

While at DTU, Élise will work on algebraic curves with many automorphisms with a view to their application in cryptosystems.

From the 9th of January till the 4th of February Peter Beelen will visit the Department of Mathematics at IIT-Bombay as visiting professor. During this visit he will give several lectures on algebraic aspects of coding theory as well as conduct research with his host Sudhir R. Ghorpade.

Today postdoc Vincent Neiger started in the algebra group. He is supported for two years by the H.C.Ørsted foundation and will work on fast algorithms on matrices with polynomial entries.

Today a workshop took place at DTU in connection to the FNU-project “How secret is a secret?”. Apart from DTU, the participants came from AU and AAU. A short program of the workshop can be found here.