Quasi-Perfect Lee Codes of Radius 2 and Arbitrarily Large Dimension

A construction of two-quasi-perfect Lee codes is given over the space ?np for p prime, p ? ±5 (mod 12), and n = 2[p/4]. It is known that there are infinitely many such primes. Golomb and Welch conjectured that perfect codes for the Lee metric do not exist for dimension n ? 3 and radius r ? 2. This conjecture was proved to be true for large radii as well as for low dimensions. The codes found are very close to be perfect, which exhibits the hardness of the conjecture. A series of computations show that related graphs are Ramanujan, which could provide further connections between coding and graph theories

Communication-Computation Efficient Gradient Coding

This paper develops coding techniques to reduce the running time of distributed learning tasks. It characterizes the fundamental tradeoff to compute gradients (and more generally vector summations) in terms of three parameters: computation load, straggler tolerance and communication cost. It further gives an explicit coding scheme that achieves the optimal tradeoff based on recursive polynomial constructions, coding both across data subsets and vector components. As a result, the proposed scheme allows to minimize the running time for gradient computations. Implementations are made on Amazon EC2 clusters using Python with mpi4py package. Results show that the proposed scheme maintains the same generalization error while reducing the running time by $32\%$ compared to uncoded schemes and $23\%$ compared to prior coded schemes focusing only on stragglers (Tandon et al., ICML 2017)

Artin's primitive root conjecture -a survey -

This is an expanded version of a write-up of a talk given in the fall of 2000 in Oberwolfach. A large part of it is intended to be understandable by non-number theorists with a mathematical background. The talk covered some of the history, results and ideas connected with Artin's celebrated primitive root conjecture dating from 1927. In the update several new results established after 2000 are also discussed.Comment: 87 pages, 512 references, to appear in Integer