At the "day of research" at Stuttgart University, June 7, 2023, scientists from all ten faculties were honored for their outstanding publications from the years 2021 and 2022.
Falculty 5's prize for 2021 is awarded to the Institute of Telecommunications (INÜ) for their publication entitled "Automorphism Ensemble Decoding of Reed–Muller Codes" by Marvin Geiselhart, Ahmed Elkelesh, Moustafa Ebada, Sebastian Cammerer and Stephan ten Brink, which appeared in IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol. 69, no. 10, pp. 6424-6438, Oct. 2021, doi: 10.1109/TCOMM.2021.3098798.
In the paper, the authors propose a novel decoding framework for Reed-Muller codes, a class of error-correcting codes. The decoding framework uses the automorphism group of the code, i.e., its symmetries, to obtain multiple different views on the noisy received sequence, thereby increasing the chance of decoding success. As this type of decoder is easy to parallelize, it can enable communications applications requiring very low latency but high reliability, such as automated driving, collaborative industrial robots or telesurgery.
The paper received substantial attention, many citations and sparked interest in applying this new decoding paradigm also for other classes of error-correcting codes.