Daniel J. Costello

Biography

Daniel J. Costello, Jr. and G. David Forney, Jr.’s “Channel Coding: The Road to Channel Capacity” traces the history of the field of channel coding and of progress towards reaching channel capacity. Channel capacity (or the “Shannon limit”) measures how fast information can be reliably transmitted over a communications channel. The paper by Costello and Forney details the efforts during the past 60 years to design codes and decoding schemes that could approach the Shannon limit, discussing the successes and failures of both algebraic coding techniques, which were the dominant techniques for several decades, and probabilistic coding techniques, which recently solved the problem of approaching the Shannon limit in practical systems. Both authors have been pioneers in the development of channel coding theory since the 1960s.

An IEEE Life Fellow, Dr. Costello has previously received the Humboldt Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany. Dr. Costello’s research interests are in the area of digital communications, with special emphasis on error control coding and coded modulation. He has numerous technical publications and co-authored a popular textbook in the field. He is currently the Leonard Bettex Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.