What’s New

8-12 August 2016, Johan participated in a seminar “Coding Theory in the time of Big Data” at the beautiful Schloss Dagstuhl. As is common at Dagstuhl, the seminar had only few talks, leaving ample time for discussion and collaboration on the seminar’s topic. Johan worked mostly on finding new good rank-metric codes and on private information retrieval schemes. He also gave a short talk on Coding Theory in SageMath and the upcoming SageDays 75 on Coding Theory.

Johan presented 22nd July the paper “Algorithms for Simultaneous Padé Approximations”, coauthored with Arne Storjohann at the conference ISSAC 2016, held at Wilfred Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada.

Johan participated in MICA 2016 in Waterloo, Canada, a workshop on computer algebra held in honor of Erich Kaltofen. Erich has many contributions to computer algebra, for example in fast linear algebra, polynomial multiplication, polynomial factorization, and sparse interpolation. These and other topics were covered during the conference.

Sudhir R. Ghorpade from the Department of Mathematics at IIT-Bombay is visiting the algebra group this week. He will together with Peter Beelen and Mrinmoy Datta finish a paper in which several generalized Hamming weights of projective Reed-Muller codes are determined. Compared to the current state-of-the-art in this area, the paper will mark significant progress.

Sudhir has visited DTU several times and has coauthored several papers with Peter and other authors from DTU before. You can see us working on our current project in the picture above.

Peter Beelen will give a talk on Monday June 6 at the 2016 SIAM conference on discrete mathematics in Atlanta, USA.

He will talk about his recent progress, obtained together with postdoc Mrinmoy Datta and Prof. Sudhir Ghorpade from IIT-Bombay, on the determination of the generalized Hamming weights of projective Reed-Muller codes. Knowing these weights helps in finding the answer to a very fundamental question in algebra: “How many solutions can a system of polynomial equations have over a finite field?”

Postdoctoral researcher Nurdagül Anbar will give a talk on June 3rd on the N-cube days at KU. At this workshop several researchers on number theory will present their work. Nurdagül will talk about recent results on the asymptotic p-rank of towers of function fields.

Starting the 1st of June, Mrinmoy Datta will become a member of the algebra group in the section for mathematics at DTU Compute. He obtained a prestigious two-year postdoctoral research grant from DFF-FNU for the project Intersection of hypersurfaces: the fundament of algebraic coding theory (Grant No. 6108-00362).

Mrinmoy obtained his Ph.D. degree in mathematics at IIT-Bombay (India), under the supervision of Prof. S.R. Ghorpade. The algebra group looks forward to working together with Mrinmoy in the coming two years!

The article “The structure of dual Grassmann codes” by Peter Beelen and Fernando Piñero has just appeared in the high ranking journal Designs, Codes and Cryptography (DCC). Co-author Fernando Piñero is an old acquaintance of the algebra group: Fernando did his Ph.D. between 2011-2014 supervised by Peter Beelen and Prof. Emeritus Tom Høholdt. After his Ph.D. Fernando became a postdoc at the IIT-Bombay, India. Currently he is working at the UPR (University Puerto Rico).

During the week 18. April to 22. April, the black board in Mathematicum was filled with algebraic curves and Riemann-Roch spaces as Alain Couvreur from Inria, France, visited us.
Alain Couvreur is a leading expert on algebraic geometry and coding theory, and we spent the week looking into high-performance decoding of Algebraic Geometry codes.

Together with Canadian researcher Arne Storjohann, Johan Nielsen has written the paper “Algorithms for Simultaneous Padé Approximations” which has been accepted to the prestigious conference ISSAC: International Symposium in Symbolic and Algebraic Computation.

ISSAC 2016 will be held in Waterloo, Canada in July. Johan will go there and present the results. In fact, he will spend the entire month of July with the Symbolic Computation group at University of Waterloo.