Henry Pfister

Henry Pfister
  • Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
  • Associate Professor of Mathematics (Secondary)
External address: 140 Science Dr., 305 Gross Hall, Durham, NC 27708
Internal office address: 90984, 315 Gross Hall, Durham, NC 27708
Phone: (919) 660-5288

Henry D. Pfister received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 2003 from the University of California, San Diego and is currently a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Duke University with a secondary appointment in Mathematics. Prior to that, he was a professor at Texas A&M University (2006-2014), a post-doctoral fellow at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (2005-2006), and a senior engineer at Qualcomm Corporate R&D in San Diego (2003-2004).

He received the NSF Career Award in 2008 and a Texas A&M ECE Department Outstanding Professor Award in 2010.  He is a coauthor of the 2007 IEEE COMSOC best paper in Signal Processing and Coding for Data Storage and a coauthor of a 2016 Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC) best paper.  He served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2013-2016) and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2015-2016).

His current research interests include information theory, communications, probabilistic graphical models, machine learning, and deep neural networks.

Education & Training

  • Ph.D., University of California at San Diego 2003

Zhang, Fan, and Henry D. Pfister. “Compressed Sensing and Linear Codes over Real Numbers.” 2008 Information Theory and Applications Workshop, IEEE, 2008, pp. 278–81.

Fan, Z., and H. D. Pfister. “List-message passing achieves capacity on the q-ary symmetric channel for large q.” Globecom  Ieee Global Telecommunications Conference, 2007, pp. 283–87. Scopus, doi:10.1109/GLOCOM.2007.60. Full Text

Diggavi, S., et al. “Capacity upper bounds for the deletion channel.” Ieee International Symposium on Information Theory  Proceedings, 2007, pp. 1716–20. Scopus, doi:10.1109/ISIT.2007.4557469. Full Text

Soriaga, J. B., et al. “Determining and approaching achievable rates of binary intersymbol interference channels using multistage decoding.” Ieee Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 53, no. 4, 2007, pp. 1416–29. Scopus, doi:10.1109/TIT.2007.892778. Full Text

Zhang, Fan, and Henry D. Pfister. “List-Message Passing Achieves Capacity on the q-ary Symmetric Channel for Large q..” Globecom, IEEE, 2007, pp. 283–87.

Sason, I., and H. D. Pfister. “Recent results on capacity-achieving codes for the erasure channel with bounded complexity.” Ieee Convention of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Israel, Proceedings, 2006, pp. 339–43. Scopus, doi:10.1109/EEEI.2006.321096. Full Text

Hou, J., et al. “Link-level modeling and performance of CDMA interference cancellation.” Globecom  Ieee Global Telecommunications Conference, 2006. Scopus, doi:10.1109/GLOCOM.2006.661. Full Text

Sason, Igal, and Henry D. Pfister. “Recent results on capacity-achieving codes for the erasure channel with bounded complexity.” 2006 Ieee 24th Convention of Electrical & Electronics Engineers in Israel, IEEE, 2006, pp. 343-+.

Pfister, H. D. “Finite-length analysis of a capacity-achieving ensemble for the binary erasure channel.” Proceedings of the Ieee Itsoc Information Theory Workshop 2005 on Coding and Complexity, Itw2005, 2005, pp. 166–70. Scopus, doi:10.1109/ITW.2005.1531880. Full Text

Pfister, H. D., et al. “Capacity-achieving ensembles for the binary erasure channel with bounded complexity.” Ieee Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 51, no. 7, 2005, pp. 2352–79. Scopus, doi:10.1109/TIT.2005.850079. Full Text

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