Coding and Cryptography

From June 8-26, 2004 the University of Notre Dame will be the host of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) summer graduate program in mathematics. The course will concentrate on Coding and Cryptography. This program is open to graduate students from IMA Participating Institutions. Students are nominated by their department head. Participating Institution department heads nominate graduate students from their institution by an e-mail to visit@ima.umn.edu with the students' names and e-mail addresses. The IMA will provide local expenses for up to two graduate students from each participating institution. Transportation expenses and local expenses for additional students may be charged to the Participating Institution's IMA account. Students from non-participating institutions may send inquiries to Lisa Tranberg <lisa.m.tranberg.1@nd.edu> about the possibility of participation. Students should plan to arrive on June 7 and depart on June 27.

Every day will be two 50 minutes lectures in coding theory and two 50 minutes lecture in cryptography by some of the leading researchers in the field. In addition to the main speakers there will be about 20 senior mentors present. These senior mentors offer in the beginning of the summer school some challenging research projects. Students in groups of 3-4 will then study intensely these research projects under the guidance of the senior mentors. It is hoped that some student groups will make progress on their research projects and will be able to present their findings to all participants in the third week of the summer school.

The topics in coding theory will include:

• Algebraic block coding theory.
• Convolutional Codes.
• Turbo codes, LDPC codes and Codes on Graphs.

The topics in cryptography will include:

• Design of secret key block ciphers.
• Design of public key systems.
• Introduction to computational complexity.
• Issues of computational number theory.

Lecturers:

G. David Forney, Jr., Massachusetts Institute of Technology  Talk materials
James L. Massey, ETH Zurich
Michael E. O'Sullivan, San Diego State University
Vera Pless, University of Illinois at Chicago
Joachim Rosenthal, University of Notre Dame
Andreas Stein, University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign