CMO/Banff Workshop — Algebraic Methods in Coding Theory and Communication

The workshop will concentrate on three contemporary, central themes in coding theory and its applications. Algebraic coding theory tackles classical communication problems, such as error-free communication between a source and a receiver over a noisy channel, using a wide range of tools from computational algebra, algebraic geometry, and probability theory. More recently coding theory has found applications to emerging challenges in communication. The kind of problems that arise has been shifting, as our digital lives got more and more interconnected. Network Coding seeks answers to problems of maximization of information flow over networks. These answers often require establishing new communication schemes, relying on mathematical structures which were not used in this context before. In the last few years a new set of problems with local features arose from practical applications such as distributed storage of large amounts of data. Locally recoverable codes allow the recovery of a codeword symbol's erasure by mean of a small set of other codeword symbols. These codes are a central topic of research of the last few years, due also to their applicability to these problems.