Joint Colloquium Distinguished Lecture Series

Digital Fountain: Advanced standardized solutions for digital media delivery

photo of Michael Luby Wednesday, November 14, 2007
306 Soda Hall (HP Auditorium)
4:00 - 5:00 pm

Michael Luby
Digital Fountain

Abstract:

Since its inception, Digital Fountain has evolved into the leading provider of advanced standardized solutions for digital medial delivery based on fountain codes. Raptor codes, the most advanced form of fountain codes, have been incorporated into a wide variety of standards and applications in several markets, including Mobile Broadcast, IPTV, Defense, and Internet Video Streaming. In this talk we provide a brief introduction to Digital Fountain and its evolution, and then provide an overview of Raptor codes, the protocols that have been developed around them, the standards into which they have been incorporated, and the applications into which they have been embedded.

Biography:

Dr. Michael Luby is a world-renowned Theoretical Computer Scientist, and has made breakthrough research contributions in the areas of coding theory, randomized algorithm design and analysis, transport protocols and cryptography. He has led the development of several transport standards within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) that have been adopted by the leading commercial standards such as the 3GPP MBMS standard, the DVB-H IPDC standard, and the DVP IPTV standard.

Michael earned a B.Sc. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983. In 1988 Dr. Luby was promoted to Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Toronto, and in that same year he joined the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley to become the Leader of the Theory Group and concurrently an Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley. Dr. Michael Luby cofounded Digital Fountain, Inc. in 1998, where he currently holds the position of Chief Technology Officer. Michael is the inventor of the Luby Transform (LT) fountain codes, the unique breakthrough technology upon which the Digital Fountain products are based.

Michael is a recipient of the 2002 IEEE Information Theory Society Information Theory Paper Award for leading the design and analysis of the first irregular LDPC error-correcting codes, the 2003 SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize for the seminal paper showing how to construct a cryptographically unbreakable pseudo-random generator from any one-way function, and the 2007 IEEE Eric E. Sumner Communications Theory Award for outstanding contributions to communications technology. Michael is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a Member of the ACM.

Michael and his wife, Maria, reside in Berkeley, California with their twin boys Lukas and Alexander.


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