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Information Theory
Spring 2007

News

• Class Evaluation: There will be a class evaluation online between June 18 and June 29. I would very much like to encourage all students to participate! Thanks!
• Final Grade: You will receive your final grade of this course together with your results from the final exam (the final grade will be depicted beside the grade of the final exam). The final exams will be returned and discussed on June 25 during normal class hours. If you cannot make it, contact the Teaching Assistant Lin Ding-Jie.
• Final Exam: The final exam will take place on
  • Wednesday, June 20, 15:40-18:30 (Note that this is one hour longer than usual!)
  Regulations:
  • open book: any book is allowed
  • not allowed are: any telecommunication devices like mobile phones, any "friend" or other help from outside...
  • covered material: everything we covered in class
• Mid-Term Exam: The mid-term exam will take place on
  • Wednesday, April 25, 15:40-18:30 (Note that this is one hour longer than usual!)
  Regulations:
  • open book: any book is allowed
  • not allowed are: any telecommunication devices like mobile phones, any "friend" or other help from outside...
  • covered material: everything covered in class until (and including) April 9, i.e., everything up to the definition of information capacity, and strongly and weakly symmetric DMCs

Instructor

Stefan M. Moser
Engineering Building IV, Room 727
phone: 03-571 21 21 ext. 54548
e-mail:

Teaching Assistant

In case you would like to discuss some questions in Chinese, you might contact my TA:

• Lin Ding-Jie
  e-mail:

Time and Place

The course is scheduled for 4 hours per week:

• Monday, 15:40-17:30, Engineering Building IV, Room 021 (ED021)
• Wednesday, 15:40-17:30, Engineering Building IV, Room 021 (ED021)

On Wednesday, the second hour is reserved for exercises. The mid-term and final exams will be 3 hours.

Course Objectives

This course is an introduction to Information Theory. We will cover the most important results concerning data compression and reliable communication over a communication channel. The course will follow approximately the following schedule:

• Introduction and basic definitions:
  • entropy
  • mutual information
  • relative entropy
• Source coding: how to compress data efficiently?
  • Kraft inequality
  • source coding theorem for a single random variable
  • Shannon-Fano codes
  • Huffman codes
  • source coding theorem for a discrete memoryless source
  • Tunstall codes
  • universal codes
• Channel coding: how to transmit data reliably?
  • Fano's inequality and data processing lemma
  • converse to channel coding theorem for discrete memoryless channel
  • AEP and typical sequences
  • channel coding theorem
  • continuous random variables and entropy
  • channel coding theorem for the AWGN channel

We hope that a student who finishes the course will be able to understand the basic principles underlying any communication or data storage system.

Prerequisites

The following lectures/topics are recommended:

• Probability
• once more Probability
• Principles of Communication Engineering I and II (preferably)
• joy in math and engineering

Textbook

The course will be mainly be based on

• Thomas M. Cover and Joy A. Thomas: "Elements of Information Theory," second edition, Wiley, 2006.

You find here a link to an electronic version of the book. Sometimes additional lecture notes will be distributed.

Further references and recommended readings:

• Robert G. Gallager: "Information Theory and Reliable Communication," Wiley, 1968.
• Raymond W. Yeung: "A First Course in Information Theory," Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2005.
• James L. Massey: "Applied Digital Information Theory I and II," lecture notes, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich. (Link to electronic version)

Grading

Every week there will be an exercise consisting of a couple of problems that needs to be solved at home. For the understanding of the course and also as a preparation for the mid-term and final exam we highly recommend to solve the exercises! Since the material of this course is rather demanding by itself, we have decided not to further challenge the students with additional tasks like, e.g., a presentation of a paper. We hope that the saved time will instead be used for solving the exercises and reading the textbook!

The grade will be an average of

• the homework (15%),
• the midterm exam (35%), and
• the final exam (50%).

The grade of the homework will not be based on the correctness of the answers, but rather the effort the student shows in trying to solve them. To pass the course there is the additional condition that at least 10 exercises have to be handed in.

This course is worth 3 credits.

Time Table

Special Remarks

The lecture will be held in English.

-||-   _|_ _|_     /    __|__   Stefan M. Moser
[-]     --__|__   /__\    /__   Senior Scientist, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
_|_     -- --|-    _     /  /   Adjunct Professor, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
/ \     []  \|    |_|   / \/    Web: https://moser-isi.ethz.ch/