ACCESS
Algebraic Coding and Cryptography
Seminar Series
Online Event
ACCESS is a joint effort designed to highlight world-class research in coding theory, cryptography, and related areas and to encourage collaboration among its participants.
Next seminar
April 01
April 01
Pascal O. Vontobel
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
On counting arrays with certain properties
Abstract. Consider the set of arrays of size n by n that contain only zeros and ones. How many of these arrays have exactly k ones per column and k ones per row? For k = 1, it is straightforward to find the answer (n factorial). However, for k > 1, solving this problem (even approximately) becomes more interesting and challenging. In this presentation I will discuss how the above question is motivated by applications in constrained coding, and how it can be approached with toolsfrom graphical models, matroid theory, and real stable polynomials.
(Relevant background about graphical models, matroid theory, and real stable polynomials will be introduced as needed.)
(Based on joint work with Yuwen Huang.)
Biography.
Pascal O. Vontobel received the Diploma degree in electrical engineering in 1997, the Post-Diploma degree in information techniques in 2002, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 2003, all from ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
From 1997 to 2002, he was a research and teaching assistant at the Signal and Information Processing Laboratory at ETH Zurich. From 2006 to 2013, he was a research scientist with the Information Theory Research Group at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA, USA. Since 2014, he has been with the Department of Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where, since 2023, he has been a (full) professor, department chairman, and graduate division head. Besides this, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2002-2004), a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2004-2005), a postdoctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006), and a visiting scholar at Stanford University (2014). His research interests lie in information and coding theory, quantum information processing, data science, communications, and signal processing.
Dr. Vontobel was an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2009-2012), an Awards Committee Member of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2013-2014), a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2014-2015), an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications (2014-2017), and currently is a Thomas Cover Dissertation Awards Committee Member of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2023-2025). Moreover, he was/will be a TPC co-chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (2016, 2027), the IEICE International Symposium on Information Theory and its Applications (2018), and the IEEE Information Theory Workshop (2018). He is the director of the Croucher Summer Courses in Information Theory (2021, 2023, 2025), co-organized several topical workshops, and was on the technical program committees of many international conferences. Furthermore, he was multiple times a plenary speaker at international information and coding theory conferences, received an exemplary reviewer award from the IEEE Communications Society, and was awarded the ETH medal for his Ph.D. dissertation. He is an IEEE Fellow.