Dr. Mario Blaum gives a talk at the Department

 

The talk abstract and the biography of Dr. Blaum are shown next:

 

 

Abstract:

 

Array codes are a broad family of codes that are based on simple parity operations in a two-dimensional framework. Their main applications are in Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) architectures and in recovery of large packets of data when data is transmitted in packets (like in the Internet). They can be regarded as erasure correcting codes in an mxn array, where a number of columns contain parity while k of them contain information. When the code can recover up to n-k erased columns, its performance is optimal (it meets the Singleton bound) and the code is called Maximum Distance Separable (MDS). I will concentrate mainly on MDS codes. MDS codes recovering up to two erasures have been widely used. Examples of these codes are the EVENODD code and the Row-Diagonal Parity (RDP) code. A competitor of MDS array codes are Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. However, RS codes are based on finite field operations, as opposed to array codes, which are based on simple parity lines.  As a consequence, array codes are simpler to implement. I will give a review of array codes and

state some of the main challenges to their construction. The talk requires a general knowledge of error-correcting codes, but mainly it will be self-contained.

 

BIO:

 

Mario Blaum was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1951.

He received the degree of Licenciado from the University of Buenos Aires in 1977, the M. Sc. degree rom the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) in 1981 and the Ph. D. degree from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1984, all these degrees in Mathematics. From January to June, 1985, he was a Research Fellow at the  Department of Electrical Engineering at Caltech. In August, 1985, he joined the IBM Research Division at the Almaden Research Center. In January, 2003, his division was transferred to Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, where he was a Research Staff Member until February, 2009. At present, he is a Software Test Specialist a the IBM Almaden Research Center, and a Consulting  Researcher of the Group GASS at the Universidad Complutense de

Madrid, Spain.

 

Dr. Blaum’s research interests include Storage Technology, comprising all aspects of coding and synchronization. He is a Fellow of the IEEE since 2000.