Information theory course: Message 1

The textbook for this course is Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms. There are five copies of the book in the library, and the book is available at http://www.aims.ac.za/~mackay/itila/. south africa

AIMS Students wishing to view the book directly without using a web-browser can use ghostview, acroread, or xpdf: 

    gv ~mackay/public_html/itprnn/book.ps.gz  
    xpdf ~mackay/public_html/itprnn/book.pdf  
    acroread ~mackay/public_html/itprnn/book.pdf 

Optional advance reading

It is not necessary to do any reading before the first lecture, but if you would like to read the material we will be covering during the first three days (for example, if you have any difficulty with English), please read:

The main topics I plan for the next three weeks are "Noisy channel coding" (reliable communication over unreliable channels); and "Source coding" (data compression). [Chapters 1, 4, 5, 6, & 14.]