Polar Codes: Implementations and Finite-Length Analysis

The discovery of the channel polarization phenomenon and polar codes is one of the most recent fundamental advances in coding theory. Polar codes provably achieve the fundamental limit of capacity for a wide range of channels with explicit constructions and low encoding and decoding complexity. In the first part of this talk, we provide a brief overview of polar codes and describe the most recent advances towards incorporating them in 5G wireless communications. In the second part, we discuss some of the recent advances in characterizing the finite-length behavior of polar codes in different scenarios as well as connections with optimal scaling exponents.

Hessam Mahdavifar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He received the B.Sc. degree from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2007, the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California San Diego (UCSD), USA, in 2009, and 2012, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. He was with the Samsung Mobile Solutions Lab between 2012 and 2016. Concurrently, he was with UCSD as Research Scholar and Lecturer. His general research interests are in coding theory, information theory, algorithms, and game theory with applications in wireless communications, security, data storage, and IoT. He has won several awards including the Best Paper Award in the 2015 IEEE International Conference on RFID, the UCSD Shannon Memorial Fellowship, and two Silver Medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad.