Rüdiger Urbanke
EPFL IC IINFCOM LTHC
INR 116 (Bâtiment INR)
Station 14
1015 Lausanne
+41 21 693 76 92
+41 21 693 76 95
Office: INR 116
EPFL › IC › IINFCOM › LTHC
Website: https://lthcwww.epfl.ch/
Expertise
Mission
He was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 2000 to 2004, served as President of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 2017, and is currently the Dean of I&C. Dr. Urbanke is co-author of Modern Coding Theory (Cambridge University Press).
His research spans the design and analysis of error-correcting codes for both classical and quantum communication, as well as the theoretical foundations of modern machine learning.
Awards:
2023 Claude E. Shannon Award
2023 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award
2021 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award
2016 STOC Best Paper Award
2014 La Polysphere Teaching Award
2014 IEEE Hamming Medal
2013 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award
2011 MASCOT Best Paper Award
2011 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award
2009 La Polysphere Teaching Award
2002 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award
Fulbright Scholarship
My students have won the following awards:
M. Mondelli, 2021 IEEE Information Theory Paper Award
M. Mondelli, EPFL Doctorate Award 2018
M. Mondelli, Patrick Denantes Award, 2017
M. Mondelli, IEEE IT Society Student Paper Award at ISIT, 2015
M. Mondelli, Dan David Prize Scholarship, 2015
H. Hassani, Inaugural Thomas Cover Dissertation Award, 2014
S. Kudekar, 2013 & 2021 IEEE Information Theory Paper Award
A. Karbasi, Patrick Denantes Award, 2013
V. Venkatesan, Best Paper Award at MASCOTS, 2011
A. Karbasi, Best Student Paper Award at ICASSP, 2011 (with R. Parhizkar)
A. Karbasi, Best Student Paper Award at ACM SIGMETRICS, 2010 (with S. Oh)
S. Korada, ABB Dissertation Award, 2010
S. Korada, IEEE IT Society Student Paper Award at ISIT, 2009 (with E. Sasoglu)
S. Korada, IEEE IT Society Student Paper Award at ISIT, 2008
CONTACT
Muriel Bardet
Building INR 137
Station 14
CH-1015 Lausanne
Tel. 41 21 693 76 95
muriel.bardet@epfl.ch
Education
EE
| PhD in EE
1992 – 1995
WashU
Directed by
Bixio Rimoldi
EE
| MS in EE
1991 – 1992
WashU
Directed by
Bixio Rimoldi
EE
| Dimplomingenieur in Elektrotechnik1985 – 1990 TU Wien
Awards
IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award
IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
2011
IEEE Hamming Medal
IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
2014
Claude E. Shannon Award
IEEE Information Theory Society
2023
IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award
IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
2023
IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award
IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
2021
STOC Best Paper Award
ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC)
2016
IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award
IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
2013
MASCOT Best Paper Award
2011
La Polysphere Teaching Award
2009
IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award
2002
A Vector-Based Algorithm for Generating Complete Balanced Reaction Sets with Arbitrary Numbers of Reagents
2025Vector-Based Approach to the Stoichiometric Analysis of Multicomponent Chemical Reactions: The Case of Black Powder
2025Reed-Muller Codes for Quantum Pauli and Multiple Access Channels
2025. 2025 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, 2025-06-22 - 2025-06-27. DOI : 10.1109/isit63088.2025.11195303.Noisy Quantum Communication and Computation
Lausanne, EPFL, 2025. DOI : 10.5075/epfl-thesis-10588.Federated One-Shot Learning with Data Privacy and Objective-Hiding
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. 2025. DOI : 10.1109/tifs.2025.3570132.Entanglement Sharing Across a Damping-Dephasing Channel
2024. 2024 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, Athens, Greece, 2024-07-07 - 2024-07-12. p. 1432 - 1437. DOI : 10.1109/isit57864.2024.10619242.Random matrix methods for high-dimensional machine learning models
Lausanne, EPFL, 2024. DOI : 10.5075/epfl-thesis-10524.Beyond worst-case analysis, with or without predictions
Lausanne, EPFL, 2023. DOI : 10.5075/epfl-thesis-9958.On the Efficiency of Polar-Like Decoding for Symmetric Codes
Ieee Transactions On Communications. 2022. DOI : 10.1109/TCOMM.2021.3121442.Polar Codes Do Not Have Many Affine Automorphisms
2022. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Espoo, FINLAND, 2022-06-26 - 2022-07-01. p. 2374 - 2378. DOI : 10.1109/ISIT50566.2022.9834782.Symmetry in design and decoding of polar-like codes
Lausanne, EPFL, 2022. DOI : 10.5075/epfl-thesis-8989.Mutual information for low-rank even-order symmetric tensor estimation
Information And Inference-A Journal Of The Ima. 2021. DOI : 10.1093/imaiai/iaaa022.The Stability of Low-Density Parity-Check Codes and Some of its Consequences
Ieee Transactions On Information Theory. 2021. DOI : 10.1109/TIT.2021.3119392.A Statistical Physics approach to a multi-channel Wigner spiked model
Europhysics Letters - European Physical Society Letters (EPL). 2021. DOI : 10.1209/0295-5075/ac4794.Learning from survey propagation: a neural network for MAX-E-3-SAT
Machine Learning-Science And Technology. 2021. DOI : 10.1088/2632-2153/ac0496.The Solution of the Deep Boltzmann Machine on the Nishimori Line
Communications In Mathematical Physics. 2021. DOI : 10.1007/s00220-021-04165-0.Bell Diagonal and Werner State Generation: Entanglement, Non-Locality, Steering and Discord on the IBM Quantum Computer
Entropy. 2021. DOI : 10.3390/e23070797.Criticality and conformality in the random dimer model
Physical Review E. 2021. DOI : 10.1103/PhysRevE.103.042127.Adaptive Path Interpolation Method for Sparse Systems: Application to a Censored Block Model
Ieee Transactions On Information Theory. 2021. DOI : 10.1109/TIT.2021.3052524.Deep Boltzmann Machines: Rigorous Results at Arbitrary Depth
Annales Henri Poincaré. 2021. DOI : 10.1007/s00023-021-01027-2.The Multi-species Mean-Field Spin-Glass on the Nishimori Line
Journal Of Statistical Physics. 2021. DOI : 10.1007/s10955-020-02684-z.Query Complexity of Adversarial Attacks
2021. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), ELECTR NETWORK, Jul 18-24, 2021.Statistical limits of high-dimensional inference problems
Lausanne, EPFL, 2021. DOI : 10.5075/epfl-thesis-8098.Fast Block Sequential Decoding of Polar Codes
Ieee Transactions On Vehicular Technology. 2020. DOI : 10.1109/TVT.2020.3006369.Concentration of Multi-overlaps for Random Dilute Ferromagnetic Spin Models
Journal Of Statistical Physics. 2020. DOI : 10.1007/s10955-019-02470-6.On the Second-Order Asymptotics of the Partially Smoothed Conditional Min-Entropy & Application to Quantum Compression
IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN INFORMATION THEORY. 2020. DOI : 10.1109/JSAIT.2020.3016899.Mutual Information and Optimality of Approximate Message-Passing in Random Linear Estimation
Ieee Transactions On Information Theory. 2020. DOI : 10.1109/TIT.2020.2990880.Annealing and Replica-Symmetry in Deep Boltzmann Machines
Journal Of Statistical Physics. 2020. DOI : 10.1007/s10955-020-02495-2.Constructing a provably adversarially-robust classifier from a high accuracy one
2020. 23rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), ELECTR NETWORK, Aug 26-28, 2020. p. 3674 - 3683.On the Universality of Low-Density Parity-Check Block Codes
2020. 54th Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS), Princeton, NJ, Mar 18-20, 2020. p. 86 - 91. DOI : 10.1109/CISS48834.2020.1570617344.On the dependency between the code symmetries and the decoding efficiency
2020. International Symposium on Information Theory and its Applications (ISITA), ELECTR NETWORK, Oct 24-27, 2020. p. 195 - 199.Second-order asymptotics of quantum data compression from partially-smoothed conditional entropy
2020. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), ELECTR NETWORK, Jun 21-26, 2020. p. 1846 - 1851. DOI : 10.1109/ISIT44484.2020.9173948.High-dimensional rank-one nonsymmetric matrix decomposition: the spherical case
2020. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), ELECTR NETWORK, Jun 21-26, 2020. p. 2646 - 2651. DOI : 10.1109/ISIT44484.2020.9174104.The committee machine: computational to statistical gaps in learning a two-layers neural network
Journal Of Statistical Mechanics-Theory And Experiment. 2019. DOI : 10.1088/1742-5468/ab43d2.Entropy and mutual information in models of deep neural networks
Journal Of Statistical Mechanics-Theory And Experiment. 2019. DOI : 10.1088/1742-5468/ab3430.A New Coding Paradigm for the Primitive Relay Channel
Algorithms. 2019. DOI : 10.3390/a12100218.Universal Sparse Superposition Codes With Spatial Coupling and GAMP Decoding
Ieee Transactions On Information Theory. 2019. DOI : 10.1109/TIT.2019.2919519.Near-Optimal Finite-Length Scaling for Polar Codes Over Large Alphabets
Ieee Transactions On Information Theory. 2019. DOI : 10.1109/TIT.2019.2915595.The adaptive interpolation method: a simple scheme to prove replica formulas in Bayesian inference
Probability Theory And Related Fields. 2019. DOI : 10.1007/s00440-018-0879-0.The adaptive interpolation method for proving replica formulas. Applications to the Curie-Weiss and Wigner spike models
Journal Of Physics A-Mathematical And Theoretical. 2019. DOI : 10.1088/1751-8121/ab2735.Efficient Quantum Algorithms for GHZ and W States, and Implementation on the IBM Quantum Computer
Advanced Quantum Technologies. 2019. DOI : 10.1002/qute.201900015.Construction of Polar Codes With Sublinear Complexity
Ieee Transactions On Information Theory. 2019. DOI : 10.1109/TIT.2018.2889667.Optimal errors and phase transitions in high-dimensional generalized linear models
Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences Of The United States Of America (PNAS). 2019. DOI : 10.1073/pnas.1802705116.Classification with Fairness Constraints: A Meta-Algorithm with Provable Guarantees
2019. ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT), Atlanta, GA, Jan 29-31, 2019. p. 319 - 328. DOI : 10.1145/3287560.3287586.Mutual Information for Low-Rank Even-Order Symmetric Tensor Factorization
2019. IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), Visby, SWEDEN, Aug 25-28, 2019. p. 75 - 79. DOI : 10.1109/ITW44776.2019.8989408.Mixing of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo on strongly log-concave distributions 2: Numerical integrators
2019. 22nd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), Naha, JAPAN, Apr 16-18, 2019. p. 586 - 595.Displacement Convexity in Spatially Coupled Scalar Recursions
Ieee Transactions On Information Theory. 2019. DOI : 10.1109/TIT.2018.2864728.Systems and methods for rate-compatible polar codes for general channels
US10917194 ; US2020235851 ; CN110249559 ; EP3535889 ; WO2018083647 . 2019.Improved decoding of second-order Reed-Muller codes
2019. IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), Visby, SWEDEN, Aug 25-28, 2019. p. 534 - 538. DOI : 10.1109/ITW44776.2019.8988970.Permutation-based Decoding of Reed-Muller Codes in Binary Erasure Channel
2019. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Paris, FRANCE, Jul 07-12, 2019. p. 21 - 25. DOI : 10.1109/ISIT.2019.8849214.Mutual Information for the Stochastic Block Model by the Adaptive Interpolation Method
2019. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Paris, FRANCE, Jul 07-12, 2019. p. 405 - 409. DOI : 10.1109/ISIT.2019.8849642.From LDPC Block to LDPC Convolutional Codes: Capacity, Stability, and Universality
Lausanne, EPFL, 2019. DOI : 10.5075/epfl-thesis-9757.Online Matching with General Arrivals
2019. 60th IEEE Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), Baltimore, MD, Nov 09-12, 2019. p. 26 - 37. DOI : 10.1109/FOCS.2019.00011.Statistical Physics Methods for Community Detection
Lausanne, EPFL, 2019. DOI : 10.5075/epfl-thesis-7208.The Velocity of the Propagating Wave for Spatially Coupled Systems With Applications to LDPC Codes
Ieee Transactions On Information Theory. 2018. DOI : 10.1109/TIT.2018.2859412.Adaptive Path Interpolation for Sparse Systems: Application to a Simple Censored Block Model
2018. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Vail, CO, Jun 17-22, 2018. p. 1879 - 1883. DOI : 10.1109/ISIT.2018.8437628.A Compressed Sensing Approach for Distribution Matching
2018. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Vail, CO, Jun 17-22, 2018. p. 1266 - 1270. DOI : 10.1109/ISIT.2018.8437781.The Mutual Information in Random Linear Estimation Beyond i.i.d. Matrices
2018. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Vail, CO, Jun 17-22, 2018. p. 1390 - 1394. DOI : 10.1109/ISIT.2018.8437522.epsilon-Coresets for Clustering (with Outliers) in Doubling Metrics
2018. 59th IEEE Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), Paris, FRANCE, Oct 07-09, 2018. p. 814 - 825. DOI : 10.1109/FOCS.2018.00082.High-Dimensional Inference on Dense Graphs with Applications to Coding Theory and Machine Learning
Lausanne, EPFL, 2018. DOI : 10.5075/epfl-thesis-8954.Autoroute et aménagement du territoire vaudois. Une coordination impossible?
Vaud du ciel; Lausanne: PPUR, 2018. p. 113 - 138.The committee machine: Computational to statistical gaps in learning a two-layers neural network
2018. 32nd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), Montreal, CANADA, Dec 02-08, 2018.Almost Optimal Scaling of Reed-Muller Codes on BEC and BSC Channels
2018. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Vail, CO, Jun 17-22, 2018. p. 311 - 315. DOI : 10.1109/ISIT.2018.8437453.When Stuck, Flip a Coin : New Algorithms for Large-Scale Tasks
Lausanne, EPFL, 2018. DOI : 10.5075/epfl-thesis-8580.How to Achieve the Capacity of Asymmetric Channels
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 2018. DOI : 10.1109/TIT.2018.2789885.Entropy and mutual information in models of deep neural networks
2018. 32nd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), Montreal, CANADA, Dec 02-08, 2018.Dimensionally Tight Bounds for Second-Order Hamiltonian Monte Carlo
2018. 32nd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), Montreal, CANADA, Dec 02-08, 2018.The Stability Condition of LDPC Codes Under MAP Decoding
2018. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Vail, CO, Jun 17-22, 2018. p. 811 - 815. DOI : 10.1109/ISIT.2018.8437939.Recent Advances in Capacity Approaching Codes
Ieee Journal On Selected Areas In Communications. 2016. DOI : 10.1109/Jsac.2015.2508219.Analysis of Spatially Coupled Systems using the Potential Functional with Applications to Coding Theory
Lausanne, EPFL, 2016. DOI : 10.5075/epfl-thesis-7358.Spatial Coupling as a Proof Technique and Three Applications
Ieee Transactions On Information Theory. 2016. DOI : 10.1109/Tit.2016.2539144.From Polar to Reed-Muller Codes : Unified Scaling, Non-standard Channels, and a Proven Conjecture
Lausanne, EPFL, 2016. DOI : 10.5075/epfl-thesis-7164.Scampi: a robust approximate message-passing framework for compressive imaging
2016. International Meeting on High-Dimensional Data-Driven Science (HD3), Kyoto, JAPAN, DEC 14-17, 2015. DOI : 10.1088/1742-6596/699/1/012013.A Scaling Law to Predict the Finite-Length Performance of Spatially-Coupled LDPC Codes
Ieee Transactions On Information Theory. 2015. DOI : 10.1109/Tit.2015.2422816.Approaching the Rate-Distortion Limit With Spatial Coupling, Belief Propagation, and Decimation
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY. 2015. DOI : 10.1109/TIT.2015.2434842.Sparse Probabilistic Models : Phase Transitions and Solutions via Spatial Coupling
Lausanne, EPFL, 2015. DOI : 10.5075/epfl-thesis-6625.Introduction aux sciences de l'information
Lausanne: Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes, 2015.Wave-Like Solutions of General 1-D Spatially Coupled Systems
Ieee Transactions On Information Theory. 2015. DOI : 10.1109/Tit.2015.2438870.Noise facilitation in associative memories of exponential capacity
Journal of Neural Computation. 2014. DOI : 10.1162/NECO_a_00655.Achieving Marton's Region for Broadcast Channels Using Polar Codes
2014. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Honolulu, HI, JUN 29-JUL 04, 2014. p. 306 - 310. DOI : 10.1109/ISIT.2014.6874844.From Polar to Reed-Muller Codes: a Technique to Improve the Finite-Length Performance
2014. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT'14), Honolulu, HI, JUN 29-JUL 04, 2014. p. 131 - 135. DOI : 10.1109/ISIT.2014.6874809.Finite-Length Scaling for Polar Codes
Ieee Transactions On Information Theory. 2014. DOI : 10.1109/Tit.2014.2341919.High Symbol Rate Coherent Optical Transmission Systems: 80 and 107 Gbaud
Journal of Lightwave Technology. 2014. DOI : 10.1109/Jlt.2013.2286963.Joint Power Allocation and Path Selection for Multi-Hop Noncoherent Decode and Forward UWB Communications
Ieee Transactions On Wireless Communications. 2014. DOI : 10.1109/Twc.2014.020914.130669.Physics-Inspired Methods for Networking and Communications
IEEE Communications Magazine. 2014. DOI : 10.1109/MCOM.2014.6957155.The Cavity Method in Coding Theory
Lausanne, EPFL, 2014. DOI : 10.5075/epfl-thesis-6088.Analysis of Coupled Scalar Systems by Displacement Convexity
2014. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Honolulu, HI, JUN 29-JUL 04, 2014. p. 2321 - 2325. DOI : 10.1109/ISIT.2014.6875248.Universal Polar Codes
2014. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Honolulu, HI, JUN 29-JUL 04, 2014. p. 1451 - 1455. DOI : 10.1109/ISIT.2014.6875073.Linear Programming Decoding of Spatially Coupled Codes
Ieee Transactions On Information Theory. 2014. DOI : 10.1109/Tit.2014.2325903.Threshold Saturation for Spatially Coupled LDPC and LDGM Codes on BMS Channels
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 2014. DOI : 10.1109/Tit.2014.2360692.Spatially Coupled Codes for Channel and Source Coding
Lausanne, EPFL, 2014. DOI : 10.5075/epfl-thesis-6097.Spatially Coupled Ensembles Universally Achieve Capacity Under Belief Propagation
Ieee Transactions On Information Theory. 2013. DOI : 10.1109/Tit.2013.2280915.Message-Passing Algorithms for Quadratic Minimization
Journal of Machine Learning Research. 2013.Displacement Convexity - A Useful Framework for the Study of Spatially Coupled Codes
2013. IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), Seville, SPAIN, SEP 09-13, 2013. DOI : 10.1109/ITW.2013.6691237.Polarization and Spatial Coupling : Two Techniques to Boost Performance
Lausanne, EPFL, 2013. DOI : 10.5075/epfl-thesis-5706.Threshold Saturation in Spatially Coupled Constraint Satisfaction Problems
JOURNAL OF STATISTICAL PHYSICS. 2013. DOI : 10.1007/s10955-012-0664-x.Windowed Decoding of Spatially Coupled Codes
Ieee Transactions On Information Theory. 2013. DOI : 10.1109/Tit.2012.2231465.Iterative Coding for Network Coding
Ieee Transactions On Information Theory. 2013. DOI : 10.1109/Tit.2012.2236912.Rate-Dependent Analysis of the Asymptotic Behavior of Channel Polarization
Ieee Transactions On Information Theory. 2013. DOI : 10.1109/Tit.2012.2228295.Message-Passing Algorithms: Reparameterizations and Splittings
Ieee Transactions On Information Theory. 2013. DOI : 10.1109/Tit.2013.2259576.Teaching & PhD
Current Phd
Past Phd As Director
Changyan Di, Cyril Measson, Abdelaziz Amraoui, Vishwambhar Rathi, Shrinivas Kudekar, Satish Babu Korada, Christine Neuberg, Amin Karbasi, Vinodh Venkatesan, Seyed Hamed Hassani, Marc Vuffray, Vahid Aref, Andrei Giurgiu, Rafah El-Khatib, Marco Mondelli, Slobodan Mitrovic, Wei Liu, Kirill Ivanov, Andreas Maggiori, Dina Khaled Sayed Abdelhadi
Past Phd As Codirector
Xiao-Yu Hu, Frédérique Oggier, Ali Ajdari Rad, Mohamad Baker Dia, Grzegorz Adam Gluch
Courses
Advanced information, computation, communication I
CS-101
Discrete mathematics is a discipline with applications to almost all areas of study. It provides a set of indispensable tools to computer science in particular. This course reviews (familiar) topics as diverse as mathematical reasoning, combinatorics, discrete structures & algorithmic thinking.