New paper accepted in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

I am glad to announce that our paper “A Refinement of Expurgation” (joint work with the University of Cambridge – U.K. and Universitat Pompeu Fabra – Spain) has been accepted for publication in the journal IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

The paper is about reliable communication over noisy channels. Here is a brief description:

In the paper we show that for a wide range of communication channels and channel code ensembles with pairwise-independent codewords, with probability tending to 1 with the code length, eliminating an arbitrarily small fraction of codewords from a randomly selected code results in a code attaining the expurgated exponent. Our result is especially interesting since, for most communication channels and ensembles, the expurgated exponent is the largest known error exponent that can be achieved. Broadly speaking, the error exponent of a code is a measure of how quickly the probability of error goes to zero as the length of the codewords grows.

Published by G.Cocco

I received my M.S. degree (Cum Laude) in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, and my Ph.D. degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain. My Ph.D. studies were co-funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Catalan Telecommunications Technological Center (CTTC) of Barcelona. During my Ph.D. studies I spent more than a year at ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), Noordwijk, The Netherlands, working on the application of network coding in satellite communication networks. After my Ph.D. studies I spent nearly four years at the Institute for Communications and Navigation of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), near Munich, Germany, working as Senior Researcher and Project Manager. There I have been managing and working as researcher on projects funded by ESA, the European Union, and the German state. Between 2017 and 2019 I was with the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (robotics) and with the LTS4 Signal Processing Laboratory of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow funded by the European Commission. While at EPFL I worked on UAV communications, focusing on delay-constrained video compression and streaming. Since 2019, after being awarded the Beatriu de Pinos grant by the Catalan Government, I am with the Information Theory and Coding group of Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), Barcelona, Spain. Here I am focusing on the fundamental limits of reliable communications, video streaming and UAV communications. I published a number of international peer reviewed journals and conference papers, one book, one book chapter and I hold three patents. I mentored several among Ph.D., M.S. and B.A. students, I served twice as member of Ph.D. evaluation committees and I have been session chair at several IEEE-funded international conferences. I have been teaching assistant for EPFL "Aerial Robotics" master course (UAV communications, regulations for UAVs) and for the "Basics of Mobile Robotics" master course. My research interests lie in the fields of satellite communications, UAV communications, video streaming, information theory, interference management, IoT, and robotics