Mini-course "Codes with local decoding procedures". Lecturer: Sergey Ekhanin (Microsoft Research)

Error correcting codes allow senders to add redundancy to messages, encoding bit strings representing messages into longer bit strings called codewords, in a way that the message can still be recovered even if a fraction of the codeword bits are corrupted. In certain settings however the receiver might not be interested in recovering all the message, but rather seek to quickly recover just a few coordinates of it. Such codes have recently played an important role in cryptography and in computational complexity theory and have also been used in practice to provide reliability in large distributed storage systems. Such codes have recently played an important role in several areas of theoretical computer science and have also been used in practice to provide reliability in large distributed storage systems.  In this course we consider the main codes families with local decoding procedures. The course requires minimal knowledge of algebra over the finite fields.