This award will provide support for a special workshop titled ?Facets of Coding Theory: from Algorithms to Networks? and dedicated to the work of Ralf Koetter. The workshop will take place at the Allerton House, in Monticello, Illinois, from Sunday, September 26, until Tuesday, September 28, 2010, immediately prior to the Forty-Eighth Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing. While Ralf Koetter lost his battle with cancer a year ago February, this workshop is not only to honor his memory, but also to celebrate and explore the tremendous wealth of opportunities in research that his work in communications, information theory, coding theory and signal processing brought to light.
The Workshop on 'Facets of Coding Theory: from Algorithms to Networks', also known as 'Koetterfest' took place from Sunday, September 26 through Tuesday, September 28th at the Allerton Park and Retreat Center in Monticello Illinois. A special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, envisioned as a tribute to the scientific legacy of Ralf Koetter, was published in February 2011. The scope of the special issue encompassed all aspects of coding theory (algebraic and probabilistic), network coding, turbo equalization, as well as other topics in networks and signal processing. Ralf Koetter worked in all these areas and forged numerous groundbreaking connections among them. Further exploring these exciting connections was one of the goals of this special issue. Another goal was to highlight the many new facets of coding theory that emerged during the past decade, largely owing to the contributions of Ralf Koetter. The proceedings of the conference were published as a special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory in February, 2011. This special issue was intended as a tribute to the work of Ralf Koetter. Ralf’s premature death on February 2, 2009 deprived our community not only of one of its most beloved members, but also of an imaginative individual contributor, valued collaborator, and respected leader who had already had a significant impact on coding theory and practice, and who could have potentially contributed so much more. The contributions of Ralf Koetter to our field have been remarkably diverse and often seminal. They span a wide range of areas, from algebraic decoding algorithms, to codes on graphs, to signal processing, to network coding. The special issue included a Guest Editorial, "The Scientific Legacy of Ralf Koetter" followed by 36 contributed papers that were heavily influenced by the work of Ralf Koetter.
