Combinatorics Seminar

When: Sunday, December 11, 10am
Where: Schreiber 309
Speaker: Tali Kaufman, Bar Ilan University
Title: Locally Testable Codes and Expanders

Abstract:

Expanders and Error correcting codes are two celebrated notions, coupled together, e.g., in the seminal work on Expander Codes by Sipser and Spielman that yields some of the best codes. Recently, there is a growing interest in codes admitting algorithms that run in constant time, e.g., codes for which it is possible to distinguish in constant time between codewords and vectors far from the code. Such codes are known as locally testable codes (LTCs).

It is known that Expander Codes based on best expanders can NOT yield LTCs, so it seems that expansion is somewhat contradicting to the notion of LTCs. We show that, nevertheless, the graph associated with an LTC must be essentially an expander. Namely, this graph is a small set expander and it can be decomposed into constant many expander graphs on which the induced codes are approximately LTCs.

Based on a joint work with Irit Dinur.