Caltech Home > PMA Home > Courses
open search form
Up to all Electrical Engineering Courses for 2021-22 Show Filters

Electrical Engineering (EE) Undergraduate Courses (2021-22)

Ph/APh/EE/BE 118 ab. Physics of Measurement. 9 units (3-0-6): second, third terms. Prerequisites: Ph 127, APh 105, or equivalent, or permission from instructor. This course explores the fundamental underpinnings of experimental measurements from the perspectives of coupling, responsivity, noise, backaction, and information. Its overarching goal is to enable students to develop intuition about, and to critically evaluate, a diversity of real measurement systems - and to provide a framework for estimating the ultimate and practical limits to information that can be extracted from them. Topics will include physical signal transduction and responsivity, fundamental noise processes, modulation, frequency conversion, synchronous detection, signal-sampling techniques, digitization, signal transforms, spectral analyses, and correlation methods. The first term will cover the essential fundamental underpinnings, while topics in second term will focus their application to high frequency, microwave, and fast time-domain measurements where distributed approaches become imperative. The second term (in alternate years) may focus on topics that include either measurements at the quantum limit, biosensing and biological interfaces, of functional brain imaging. Not offered 2021-22. Instructor: Roukes.
EE/Ma/CS 126 ab. Information Theory. 9 units (3-0-6): first, second terms. Prerequisites: Ma 3. Shannon's mathematical theory of communication, 1948-present. Entropy, relative entropy, and mutual information for discrete and continuous random variables. Shannon's source and channel coding theorems. Mathematical models for information sources and communication channels, including memoryless, Markov, ergodic, and Gaussian. Calculation of capacity and rate-distortion functions. Universal source codes. Side information in source coding and communications. Network information theory, including multiuser data compression, multiple access channels, broadcast channels, and multiterminal networks. Discussion of philosophical and practical implications of the theory. This course, when combined with EE 112, EE/Ma/CS/IDS 127, EE/CS 161, and EE/CS/IDS 167, should prepare the student for research in information theory, coding theory, wireless communications, and/or data compression. EE/Ma/CS 126a offered 2021-2022; EE/Ma/CS 126b not offered 2021-2022. Instructor: Effros.
EE/Ma/CS/IDS 127. Error-Correcting Codes. 9 units (3-0-6): third term. Prerequisites: EE 55 or Ma 3. This course develops from first principles the theory and practical implementation of the most important techniques for combating errors in digital transmission or storage systems. Topics include highly symmetric linear codes, such as Hamming, Reed-Muller, and Polar codes; algebraic block codes, e.g., BCH, Reed-Solomon (including a self-contained introduction to the theory of finite fields); and sparse graph codes with iterative decoding, i.e., LDPC code and turbo codes. Students will become acquainted with encoding and decoding algorithms, design principles and performance evaluation of codes. Instructor: Kostina.
EE/Ma/CS/IDS 136. Topics in Information Theory. 9 units (3-0-6): third term. Prerequisites: Ma 3 or ACM/EE/IDS 116 or CMS 117 or Ma/ACM/IDS 140a. This class introduces information measures such as entropy, information divergence, mutual information, information density from a probabilistic point of view, and discusses the relations of those quantities to problems in data compression and transmission, statistical inference, language modeling, game theory and control. Topics include information projection, data processing inequalities, sufficient statistics, hypothesis testing, single-shot approach in information theory, large deviations. Not offered 2021-2022. Instructor: Kostina.