Technische Universität München

Frank R. Kschischang received the B.A.Sc. degree (with honors) from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, in 1985 and the M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, in 1988 and 1991, respectively, all in electrical engineering. He is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, where he has been a faculty member since 1991, and where he holds the title of Canada Research Chair in Communications Algorithms. During 1997-98, he was a visiting scientist at MIT, Cambridge, MA and in 2005 he was a visiting professor at the ETH, Zurich.
During 1997-2000, he served as an Associate Editor for Coding Theory for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. He also served as technical program co-chair for the 2004 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Chicago, and as general co-chair for ISIT 2008, Toronto. He served as the 2010 President of the IEEE Information Theory Society.

June 2010 IEEE Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, for the paper co-authored with Ralf Kötter entitled "Coding for Errors and Erasures in Random Network Coding,'' published in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 54, no. 8, pp. 3579–3591, August 2008. (Awarded - on the basis of quality, originality, utility, timeliness and presentation - to an oustanding paper published in any publication of the IEEE Communications Society or the Information Theory Society within the previous three calendar years.)

May 2010 University of Toronto Award of Excellence - Faculty Award. $1,000 prize recognizing excellence in teaching, research, and professional endeavours, awarded annually to one faculty member at the University of Toronto

March 2010 Killam Research Fellowship. Awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts to recognize distinguished Canadian scholars with an outstanding reputation in their area of research; provides two years of release time from teaching and administrative duties to pursue independent research

May 2009 ECE Spring Term Professorial Teaching Award

May 2008 ECE Student Club Departmental Teaching Award

January 2008 Tier I Canada Research Chair renewal

May 2007 ECE Service Award. For exemplary service and leadership in the development of the ECE flexible curriculum

May 2006 Faculty Teaching Award, in recognition of superb accomplishment in teaching

January 2006 IEEE Fellow, for contributions to trellis structures, graphical models and iterative decoding techniques for error-correcting codes

January 2006 Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada, for significant contributions to engineering in Canada

November 2003 Electrical and Computer Engineering "Professor of the Year" Award

November 2001 Computer Engineering "Professor of the Year" Award

January 2001 Tier I Canada Research Chair

May 1999 Province of Ontario Premier's Research Excellence Award, in recognition of [my] research into new communications algorithms that will improve telecommunications

November 1992 Electrical Engineering Class of 9T3 "Professor of the Year" Award

B. P. Smith, A. Farhood, A. Hunt, F. R. Kschischang and J. Lodge, "Staircase Codes: FEC for 100 Gb/s OTN", J. of Lightwave Technology, 2011 (to appear).

M. I. Yousefi and F. R. Kschischang, "On the Per-Sample Capacity of Nondispersive Optical Fibers", IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, vol. 57, Nov. 2011 (to appear).

B. P. Smith and F. R. Kschischang, "Future Prospects for FEC in Fiber-Optic Communications," IEEE J. Selected Topics Quantum Electronics, vol. 16, pp. 1245–1257, Sept.–Oct. 2010.

D. Silva, F. R. Kschischang and R. Kötter, "Communication over Finite-Field Matrix Channels", IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, vol. 56, pp. 1296–1305, Mar. 2010.

D. Silva, F. R. Kschischang and R. Kötter, "A Rank-Metric Approach to Error Control in Random Network Coding", IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, vol. 54, pp. 3951–3967, Sept. 2008.

V. Pechenkin and F. R. Kschischang, "Pseudolinear Optical System Reach Enhancement via Runlength-limited Coding", IEEE J. Selected Areas in Communications (Supplement on Optical Commun. and Networking), vol. 26, pp. 66–72, Aug. 2008.

A. Darabiha, A. Chan Carusone and F. R. Kschischang, "Power Reduction Techniques for LDPC Decoders", IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, vol. 43, pp. 1835–1845, Aug. 2008.

R. Kötter and F. R. Kschischang, "Coding for Errors and Erasures in Random Network Coding", IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, vol. 54, pp. 3579–3591, Aug. 2008.

H.-A. Loeliger, J. Dauwels, J. Hu, S. Korl, L. Ping and F. R. Kschischang, "The Factor Graph Approach to Model-Based Signal Processing", Proc. IEEE, vol. 95, pp. 1295–1322, 2007.

S. Hranilovic and F. R. Kschischang, "A Pixelated MIMO Wireless Optical Communication System", IEEE J. of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, vol. 12, pp. 859–874, July–Aug. 2006.

T. H. Chan, S. Hranilovic and F. R. Kschischang, "Capacity-achieving Probability Measure for Conditionally Gaussian Channels with Bounded Inputs", IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, vol. 51, pp. 2073–2088, Jun. 2005.

S. Hranilovic and F. R. Kschischang, "Optical Intensity-Modulated Directed Detection Channels: Signal Space and Lattice Codes", IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, vol. 49, pp. 1385–1399, June 2003.

F. R. Kschischang, B. J. Frey and H.-A. Loeliger, "Factor Graphs and the Sum-Product Algorithm", IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, vol. 47, pp. 498–519, February 2001.

My research interests are focussed generally on the area of digital communications; more particularly, on the area of coding theory. Coding theorists attempt to find ways to encode messages into cleverly-chosen sets of patterns - codes - that can be exploited at the receiver to decode the message, even when the received pattern has been distorted during transmission and corrupted by noise. Because error-control coding schemes are needed in just about every data transmission link, my work has many practical applications, ranging from wired channels, to wireless channels, to optical channels, and my students and I have studied a wide variety of problems in these areas.
A recent project, in collaboration with the Canadian federal Communications Research Centre and an Ottawa/Sunnyvale-based chip-design company, resulted in a family of error-correcting codes that establishes a new state-of-the-art for 100 Gb/s optical transport networks, which are optical networks in which the bits are encoded, transmitted, and decoded at the astonishing rate of 100 billion bits per second.
Within the Institute for Advanced Study at the Technische Universität München, I am working with Professor Gerhard Kramer and other experts in fiber-optic communications to try to (we hope) dramatically improve the information-carrying capabilities of optical fibers, particularly multi-mode and multi-core fibers. If successful, our work will have the every-day impact of helping to create a better, faster, more reliable Internet.