Prix Denantes 2017 awarded to Marco Mondelli
© 2018 EPFL
Marco Mondelli was awarded the Patrick Denantes Memorial Prize 2017 for his P.h.D thesis “From Polar to Reed-Muller Codes: Unified Scaling, Non-standard Channels, and a Proven Conjecture.” Marco, who works presently as a research scholar at Stanford University, elaborated his thesis in the Communication Theory Laboratory lead by Prof. Rüdiger Urbanke.
Marco’s thesis focuses on the optimal conditions under which reliable communication is possible, referred to as channel capacity. He establishes the design of practical coding schemes, which could reach such a limit, in view of next-generation communication systems requiring unprecedented improvement in performance.
In his thesis, Marco traces a road that goes from polar codes, which are low-complexity capacity-achieving coding schemes to Reed-Muller codes and investigates three main topics: unified scaling, non-standard channels, and capacity via symmetry.
His thesis also solves a long-standing open problem; how to achieve channel capacity by symmetry using Reed-Muller codes, a coding scheme exploiting the structure of algebraic codes to devise practical decoding algorithms to achieve optimal performance. Moreover, he demonstrates that codes with sufficient symmetry are capacity-achieving over erasure channels under optimal MAP (maximum a posteriori probability) decoding.
The Patrick Denantes Memorial Prize is given to a doctoral student of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences on the basis of an outstanding thesis. The Denantes Prize was founded to honor the memory of Patrick Denantes, a doctoral student of Communication Systems in IC School, who died tragically in a mountain accident on 12 July 2009.