Henry Pfister, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

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.

Please note: Henry has left the Mathematics department at Duke University; some info here might not be up to date.

Contact Info:

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

Teaching (Fall 2024):

• ECE 587.01, INFORMATION THEORY Synopsis

  Teer 203, MW 10:05 AM-11:20 AM

  (also cross-listed as STA 563.01)

Education:

Ph.D.

University of California, San Diego

2003

Keywords:

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

Recent Publications   (More 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

• QLCI - CI: Institute for Robust Quantum Simulation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2021/09-2026/08.      
• CIF: Medium: Coding Theory for DNA Storage: Synthesis, Retention, and Reconstruction, University of California - San Diego, 2022/08-2026/07.      
• Collaborative Research: NSF-BSF CIF: Small: Neural Estimation of Statistical Divergences: Theoretical Foundations and Applications to Communication Systems, National Science Foundation, 2023/07-2026/06.      
• Simplifying quantum characterization through physical symmetries, machine learning, and a top-down approach,, Army Research Office, 2020/10-2024/10.      
• Collaborative Research: CIF: Medium: QODED: Quantum codes Optimized for the Dynamics between Encoded Computation and Decoding using Classical Coding Techniques, National Science Foundation, 2021/10-2024/09.      
• FET: Small: Efficient Inference Tools for Quantum Systems: Algorithms, Applications, and Analysis, National Science Foundation, 2019/10-2023/09.      
• CIF: Small: Improving Quantum Computing and Classical Communication using Discrete Sets of Unitary Matrices, National Science Foundation, 2019/10-2023/09.      
• HDR TRIPODS: Innovations in Data Science: Integrating Stochastic Modeling, Data Representation, and Algorithms, National Science Foundation, 2019/10-2023/09.