The fifth volume of Rudolf Ahlswede's lectures on Information Theory
focuses on several problems that were at the heart of a lot of his
research. One of the highlights of the entire lecture note series is
surely Part I of this volume on arbitrarily varying channels (AVC), a
subject in which Ahlswede was probably the world's leading expert.
Appended to Part I is a survey by Holger Boche and Ahmed Mansour on
recent results concerning AVC and arbitrarily varying wiretap channels
(AVWC). After a short Part II on continuous data compression, Part III,
the longest part of the book, is devoted to distributed information.
This Part includes discussions on a variety of related topics; among
them let us emphasize two which are famously associated with Ahlswede:
"multiple descriptions", on which he produced some of the best research
worldwide, and "network coding", which had Ahlswede among the authors of
its pioneering paper. The final Part IV on "Statistical Inference under
Communication constraints" is mainly based on Ahlswede's joint paper
with Imre Csiszar, which received the Best Paper Award of the IEEE
Information Theory Society.
The lectures presented in this work, which consists of 10 volumes, are
suitable for graduate students in Mathematics, and also for those
working in Theoretical Computer Science, Physics, and Electrical
Engineering with a background in basic Mathematics. The lectures can be
used either as the basis for courses or to supplement them in many ways.
Ph.D. students will also find research problems, often with conjectures,
that offer potential subjects for a thesis. More advanced researchers
may find questions which form the basis of entire research programs.
