Henry Pfister, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Henry Pfister

Henry D. Pfister received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2003 from the University of California, San Diego and is currently a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Duke University with a secondary appointment in Mathematics.  Prior to that, he was an associate professor at Texas A&M University (2006-2014), a post-doctoral fellow at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (2005-2006), and a senior engineer at Qualcomm Corporate R&D in San Diego (2003-2004).  His current research interests include information theory, error-correcting codes, quantum computing, and machine learning.

He received the NSF Career Award in 2008 and a Texas A&M ECE Department Outstanding Professor Award in 2010.  He is a coauthor of the 2007 IEEE COMSOC best paper in Signal Processing and Coding for Data Storage and a coauthor of a 2016 Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC) best paper.  He has served the IEEE Information Theory Society as a member of the Board of Governors (2019-2022), an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2013-2016), and a Distinguished Lecturer (2015-2016).  He was also the General Chair of the 2016 North American School of Information Theory.

Office Location:  140 Science Dr., 305 Gross Hall, Durham, NC 27708
Office Phone:  +1 919 660 5288
Email Address: send me a message
Web Page:  http://pfister.ee.duke.edu

Teaching (Fall 2024):

Education:

Ph.D.University of California, San Diego2003
Keywords:

Error-correcting codes (Information theory) • Information Theory • Signal processing • Wireless communication systems

Recent Publications

  1. Coskun, MC; Liva, G; Graell I Amat, A; Lentmaier, M; Pfister, HD, Successive Cancellation Decoding of Single Parity-Check Product Codes: Analysis and Improved Decoding, Ieee Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 69 no. 2 (February, 2023), pp. 823-841, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) [doi]  [abs]
  2. Coskun, MC; Pfister, HD, An Information-Theoretic Perspective on Successive Cancellation List Decoding and Polar Code Design, Ieee Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 68 no. 9 (September, 2022), pp. 5779-5791 [doi]  [abs]
  3. Brandsen, S; Lian, M; Stubbs, KD; Rengaswamy, N; Pfister, HD, Adaptive procedures for discriminating between arbitrary tensor-product quantum states, Physical Review A, vol. 106 no. 1 (July, 2022) [doi]  [abs]
  4. Tal, I; Pfister, HD; Fazeli, A; Vardy, A, Polar Codes for the Deletion Channel: Weak and Strong Polarization, Ieee Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 68 no. 4 (April, 2022), pp. 2239-2265 [doi]  [abs]
  5. Brandsen, S; Stubbs, KD; Pfister, HD, Reinforcement Learning with Neural Networks for Quantum Multiple Hypothesis Testing, Quantum, vol. 6 (January, 2022) [doi]  [abs]
Recent Grant Support