#### Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Computer Science

Eric Schost

#### Abstract

The amount of data that we use in everyday life (social media, stock analysis, satellite communication etc.) are increasing day by day. As a result, the amount of data needs to be traverse through electronic media as well as to store are rapidly growing and there exist several environmental effects that can damage these important data during travelling or while in storage devices. To recover correct information from noisy data, we do use error correcting codes. The most challenging work in this area is to have a decoding algorithm that can decode the code quite fast, in addition with the existence of the code that can tolerate highest amount of noise, so that we can have it in practice.

List decoding is an active research area for last two decades. This research popularise in coding theory after the breakthrough work by Madhu Sudan where he used list decoding technique to correct errors that exceeds half the minimum distance of Reed Solomon codes. Towards the direction of code development that can reach theoretical limit of error correction, Guruswami-Rudra introduced folded Reed Solomon codes that reached at $1 - R - \epsilon.$ To decode this codes, one has to first interpolate a multivariate polynomial first and then have to factor out all possible roots. The difficulties that lies here are efficient interpolation, dealing with multiplicities smartly and efficient factoring. This thesis deals with all these cases in order to have folded Reed Solomon codes in practice.

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