DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING SEMINAR SERIES Speaker: Dr. Arya Mazumdar University of Massachusetts at Amherst Title: Locally Repairable Codes Date: Wednesday, May 25, 2016 Time: 3:30pm Room: E-Quad, B205 Host: Prof. Emmanuel Abbe Abstract: Due to applications in large-scale distributed storage systems, local repair properties of codes have recently earned a lot of attention. In the first part of the talk, we show that generalized locality properties of codes lead to the notion of a graph capacity that is fundamental in the study of network flow problems. This amazingly reveal a new connection between locally repairable codes (LRC) and broadcasting with side information (index coding). We further elaborate on the central challenge in this area: deriving fundamental limits on locally repairable codes over small alphabet, and construction of maximally recoverable codes. We present our very recent result on optimum rate of LRC that outperform all previous results.