John C. Kieffer
Professor

  

Area of expertise: Information Theory

Education
Ph.D., Math, 1970, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, United States
M.S., Math, 1968, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, United States
B.S., Applied Math, 1967, University of Missouri, Rolla, MO, United States

Contact information
Office: 6-179 EECS
Telephone: (612) 625-8574
E-mail: kieffer (at ) umn.edu
Research Group Web Site: http://www.ece.umn.edu/~kieffer/

Honors/Awards
1993 IEEE Fellow


Synopsis
My research interests lie within the area of communications called information theory, in which we are concerned with the existence and design of codes for fast, reliable transmission of sequential data from an information source through a communication channel. The source is described via a random process model. In order to determine the communication system performance, one needs to analyze the effect of the code and the channel on this model. To accomplish this, one may have to develop new mathematical techniques, such as when the code or the channel (or both) involve feedback. Of particular interest to me is the case in which the source model is described by unknown parameters. Then the coding must either be robust in the sense that system performance is maintained no matter what the value of the parameters, or else one must do coding and estimation hand-in-hand as one looks at more and more source data, adapting one's code as one learns more about the source via estimation of the source parameters. Interesting new techniques are being developed in this regard.

Selected publications
Rokhani, F., Kan, W.-C., Kieffer, J., and Sobelman, G., "Optimality of Bus-Invert Coding." IEEE Trans. Circuits & Systems-II:Express Briefs, 55 (2008): 1134-1138.
Kieffer, John, "Epsilon-Capacity of Binary Symmetric Averaged Channels.’" IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 53 (2006): 288-303.
Vitthaladevuni, P., Alouini, M.-S., and Kieffer, J., "Exact BER Computation for Cross QAM Constellations*."IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., 4 (2005): 3039-3050.