Thomas Courtade

I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in the UCLA Department of Electrical Engineering. I work with the Communication Systems Laboratory under the supervision of Professor Rick Wesel. Recently, I have had the great pleasure of working with Professor Suhas Diggavi and Professor Tsachy Weissman (of Stanford).

My primary research interests include probability and information theory, network coding, and combinatorics. However, I am interested in all challenging problems, particularly those with a mathematical flavor.

For the 2011-2012 academic year, I am a UCLA Dissertation Year Fellow. Beginning in the Summer of 2012, I will join the Center for Science of Information as a postdoctoral fellow, where I'll be working primarily with Professor Tsachy Weissman and Professor Sergio Verdú .

Curriculum Vitae

My CV (last updated November 1, 2011)

Some of my papers are available below.
Selected presentations are available on the CSL home page.

EE103: Applied Numerical Computing, Fall 2010.
EE231A: Information Theory, Summer 2010.
EE231E: Channel Coding Theory, Spring 2010.
EE131A: Probability, Fall 2009.
EE231E: Channel Coding Theory, Summer 2008.

(4/11/2012) I have been awarded a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship through the Center for Science of Information (a NSF Science and Technology Center). See the press release here.
(4/11/2012) I will be visiting Texas A&M University, Rice University, and UT Austin on April 30th, May 1st, and May 2nd, respectively. I'll be talking about some of my recent results on Multiterminal Source Coding under Logarithmic Loss.
(3/15/2012) Our paper "Coded Cooperative Data Exchange in Multihop Networks" has been uploaded to arXiv.
(2/27/2012) I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis!
(2/1/2012) I will be giving a graduation day talk at ITA on Multiterminal Source Coding under Logarithmic Loss on 2/8/2012.

Interested in contacting me? Emails with "CSL Research" in the subject will get the quickest reply.

Engineering-IV Room 66-124, Office: (310) 206-0956
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90024
Email: tacourta AT ucla DOT edu

Journal Papers (top)

T. A. Courtade and R. D. Wesel, "Coded Cooperative Data Exchange in Multihop Networks". Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. (arXiv:1203.3445 [cs.IT])
T. A. Courtade and T. Weissman, "Multiterminal Source Coding under Logarithmic Loss". Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. (arXiv:1110.3069 [cs.IT])
T. A. Courtade and R. D. Wesel," Optimal Allocation of Redundancy Between Packet-Level Erasure Coding and Physical-Layer Channel Coding in Fading Channels," IEEE Transactions on Communications, pages 2101 - 2109, August 2011.
B. Xie, T. A. Courtade, and R. D. Wesel, "Optimal Encoding Schemes for Several Classes of Discrete Degraded Broadcast Channels". Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. (arXiv:0811.4162 [cs.IT])

Conference Papers (top)

T. A. Courtade, "Information Masking and Amplification: The Source Coding Setting". To appear at the International Symposium on Information Theory, Cambridge, MA, July 1 - 6, 2012.
T. A. Courtade and T. Weissman, "Multiterminal Source Coding under Logarithmic Loss". To appear at the International Symposium on Information Theory, Cambridge, MA, July 1 - 6, 2012.
B. Xie, M. van der Schaar, T. A. Courtade and R. D. Wesel, "Minimizing Weighted Sum Finish Time for One-To-Many File Transfer in Peer-To-Peer Networks". Forty-Ninth Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, 2011.
T. A. Courtade and R. D. Wesel, "Weighted Universal Recovery, Practical Secrecy, and an Efficient Algorithm for Solving Both". Forty-Ninth Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, 2011.
T. A. Courtade, J. Wang, and R. D. Wesel, "Superposition Coding to Support Multiple Streams, Priorities, and Channel Capacities in the Context of GMSK", MILCOM, 2011.
J. Wang, T. A. Courtade, H. Shankar, and R. D. Wesel, "Soft Information for LDPC Decoding in Flash: Mutual-Information Optimized Quantization", Globecom, 2011.
T. A. Courtade and R. D.Wesel, "Multiterminal Source Coding with an Entropy-Based Distortion Measure". International Symposium on Information Theory, Saint-Petersburg, Russia, July 31 - August 5, 2011.
T. A. Courtade and R. D. Wesel, "Efficient Universal Recovery in Broadcast Networks". Forty-Eighth Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing: Monticello, IL, Sept. 29 - Oct. 1, 2010.
T. A. Courtade, B. Xie, and R. D. Wesel, "Optimal Exchange of Packets for Universal Recovery in Broadcast Networks". MILCOM 2010: San Jose, CA, Oct. 31 - Nov 3, 2010.
T. A. Courtade and R. D. Wesel, "A Deterministic Approach to Rate-Compatible Fountain Communication". ITA 2010: La Jolla, CA, Jan. 31 - Feb. 5, 2010.
A. Marinoni, T. A. Courtade and R. D. Wesel, "Spectrally Efficient LDPC Coded Modulations". GTTI 2009: sessione Trasmissione, Parma, Italy, June 23-25, 2009. Winner of the Francesco Carassa award for the best paper from a young scientist in the sessione Trasmissione.
T. A. Courtade and R. D. Wesel, "A Cross-Layer Perspective on Rateless Coding for Wireless Channels". ICC 2009, Dresden, Germany, June 14-18, 2009.

Patents (top)

T. A. Courtade and D. J. Jensen, "Method for Efficiently Computing the Beamforming Weights for a Large Antenna Array". U.S. Patent #7,414,578. Assigned August 19, 2008.
D. J. Jensen and T. A. Courtade, "Digital Beamforming Method and Apparatus for Pointing and Null Steering Without Calibration or Calculation of Covariance Matrix". U.S. Patent #7,570,211. Assigned August 4, 2009.

Miscellaneous (top)

A short note on random line segments in the unit square (and a corresponding challenge).
J. Wang, T. A. Courtade, T.-Y. Chen, B. Xie, and R. D. Wesel, "Designing Nonlinear Turbo Codes with a Target Ones Density", preprint available on arXiv.