Short CV
Frank R. Kschischang received the B.A.Sc. degree (with honors) from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, in 1985 and the M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, in 1988 and 1991, respectively, all in electrical engineering. He is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, where he has been a faculty member since 1991, and where he holds the title of Canada Research Chair in Communications Algorithms. During 1997-98, he was a visiting scientist at MIT, Cambridge, MA and in 2005 he was a visiting professor at the ETH, Zurich. During 1997-2000, he served as an Associate Editor for Coding Theory for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. He also served as technical program co-chair for the 2004 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Chicago, and as general co-chair for ISIT 2008, Toronto. He served as the 2010 President of the IEEE Information Theory Society.
Selected Awards
- 2010, IEEE Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, for the paper co-authored with Ralf Kötter entitled "Coding for Errors and Erasures in Random Network Coding,'' published in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 54, no. 8, pp. 3579–3591, August 2008. (Awarded - on the basis of quality, originality, utility, timeliness and presentation - to an oustanding paper published in any publication of the IEEE Communications Society or the Information Theory Society within the previous three calendar years.)
- 2010, University of Toronto Award of Excellence - Faculty Award. $1,000 prize recognizing excellence in teaching, research, and professional endeavours, awarded annually to one faculty member at the University of Toronto
- 2010, Killam Research Fellowship. Awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts to recognize distinguished Canadian scholars with an outstanding reputation in their area of research; provides two years of release time from teaching and administrative duties to pursue independent research
- 2009, ECE Spring Term Professorial Teaching Award
- 2008, ECE Student Club Departmental Teaching Award
- 2008, Tier I Canada Research Chair renewal
- 2007, ECE Service Award. For exemplary service and leadership in the development of the ECE flexible curriculum
- 2006, Faculty Teaching Award, in recognition of superb accomplishment in teaching
- 2006, IEEE Fellow, for contributions to trellis structures, graphical models and iterative decoding techniques for error-correcting codes
- 2006, Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada, for significant contributions to engineering in Canada
- 2003, Electrical and Computer Engineering "Professor of the Year" Award
- 2001, Computer Engineering "Professor of the Year" Award
- 2001, Tier I Canada Research Chair
- 1999, Province of Ontario Premier's Research Excellence Award, in recognition of [my] research into new communications algorithms that will improve telecommunications
- 1992, Electrical Engineering Class of 9T3 "Professor of the Year" Award
Research Interests
My research interests are focussed generally on the area of digital communications; more particularly, on the area of coding theory. Coding theorists attempt to find ways to encode messages into cleverly-chosen sets of patterns - codes - that can be exploited at the receiver to decode the message, even when the received pattern has been distorted during transmission and corrupted by noise. Because error-control coding schemes are needed in just about every data transmission link, my work has many practical applications, ranging from wired channels, to wireless channels, to optical channels, and my students and I have studied a wide variety of problems in these areas.
A recent project, in collaboration with the Canadian federal Communications Research Centre and an Ottawa/Sunnyvale-based chip-design company, resulted in a family of error-correcting codes that establishes a new state-of-the-art for 100 Gb/s optical transport networks, which are optical networks in which the bits are encoded, transmitted, and decoded at the astonishing rate of 100 billion bits per second.
Within the Institute for Advanced Study at the Technische Universität München, I am working with Professor Gerhard Kramer and other experts in fiber-optic communications to try to (we hope) dramatically improve the information-carrying capabilities of optical fibers, particularly multi-mode and multi-core fibers. If successful, our work will have the every-day impact of helping to create a better, faster, more reliable Internet.
Selected Publications
- Yousefi, Mansoor I.; Kschischang, Frank R.: On the Per-Sample Capacity of Nondispersive Optical Fibers. IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory 57 (11), 2011, 7522-7541.
- Smith, Benjamin P.; Kschischang, Frank R.: Future Prospects for FEC in Fiber-Optic Communications. IEEE J. Select. Topics Quantum Electron. 16 (5), 2010, 1245-1257.
- Silva, Danilo; Kschischang, Frank R.; Kotter, Ralf: Communication Over Finite-Field Matrix Channels. IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory 56 (3), 2010, 1296-1305.
- Silva, Danilo; Kschischang, Frank R.; Koetter, Ralf: A Rank-Metric Approach to Error Control in Random Network Coding. IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory 54 (9), 2008, 3951-3967.
- Pechenkin, V.; Kschischang, F.R.: Pseudolinear optical system reach enhancement via runlength-limited coding. IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun. 26 (6), 2008, 66-72.
- Darabiha, Ahmad; Chan Carusone, Anthony; Kschischang, Frank R.: Power Reduction Techniques for LDPC Decoders. IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 43 (8), 2008, 1835-1845.
- Koetter, Ralf; Kschischang, Frank R.: Coding for Errors and Erasures in Random Network Coding. IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory 54 (8), 2008, 3579-3591.
- Loeliger, Hans-Andrea; Dauwels, Justin; Hu, Junli; Korl, Sascha; Ping, Li; Kschischang, Frank R.: The Factor Graph Approach to Model-Based Signal Processing. Proceedings of the IEEE 95 (6), 2007, 1295-1322.
- Hranilovic, S.; Kschischang, F.R.: A pixelated MIMO wireless optical communication system. IEEE J. Select. Topics Quantum Electron. 12 (4), 2006, 859-874.
- Chan, T.H.; Hranilovic, S.; Kschischang, F.R.: Capacity-Achieving Probability Measure for Conditionally Gaussian Channels With Bounded Inputs. IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory 51 (6), 2005, 2073-2088.
- Hranilovic, S.; Kschischang, F.R.: Optical intensity-modulated direct detection channels: signal space and lattice codes. IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory 49 (6), 2003, 1385-1399.
- Kschischang, F.R.; Frey, B.J.; Loeliger, H.-A.: Factor graphs and the sum-product algorithm. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 47 (2), 2001, 498-519.
Publications as TUM-IAS-Fellow