Welcome to the Coding and Communications Lab!

Recent News: Starting in the summer of 2007, the National Science Foundation (NSF) will be funding six Undergraduate Research Fellowships in the Mathematical Sciences at Olin College. Students from Olin and Wellesley will be invited to apply. This page gives some information about certain projects that will be included in the research experiences. For more info on these fellowships, follow this link.

In the CCL, we work on problems related to improving the efficiency and reliability of the transmission of data, particularly with regard to wireless communications. I am currently pursuing work in the following three general areas:

Error control coding is an area of research involves using mathematics and electrical engineering to develop error-control codes, which are used to detect and correct errors that occur when data are transferred across some noisy channel. For example, error-control codes are used to correct errors caused by atmospheric disturbances that occur when deep-space photographs are transmitted to Earth. Recent work is focused on choosing subspaces of binary extension fields in order to build desirable subspace subcodes of Reed-Solomon codes.

Space-time block coding provides an alternate means for achieving reliability in wireless communications. Recent work involves the minimum decoding delay for maximum rate complex orthogonal space-time block codes and other generalizations.

L(2,1)-labelings are an area of study within graph theory that has applications to the classical channel assignment problem, wherein frequencies must be assigned to interfering transmitters in an optimal way.  

Other research interests include cryptography, which is the study of encoding data in a way that makes them unintelligible to unintended recipients. General math interests include group and field theory, discrete math, combinatorics, and specifically the connections among groups, designs, and codes.

Current research students:

STBC: Nathan Karst, Jon Pollack, Russel Torres, David Nelson

Graph Labelings: Jon Cass, Matt Tesch, Cody Wheeland