Near lossless source coding with side information only at the decoder, was first considered by Slepian and Wolf in 1970s, and rediscovered recently due to applications such as sensor network and distributed video coding. Suppose X is a source and Y is the side information. The coding scheme proposed by Slepian and Wolf, called SW coding, in which information only flows from the encoder to the decoder, was shown to achieve the rate H(X|Y) asymptotically for stationary ergodic source pairs, but not for non-ergodic case, shown by Yang and He. Recently, a new source coding paradigm called interactive encoding and decoding(IED) was proposed for near lossless coding with side information only at the decoder, where information flows in both ways, from the encoder to the decoder and vice verse. The results by Yang and He show that IED schemes are much more appealing than SW coding schemes to applications where the interaction between the encoder and the decoder is possible. However, the IED schemes proposed by Yang and He do not have an intrinsic structure that is amenable to design and implement in practice. Towards practical design, we restrict the encoding method to linear block codes, resulting in linear IED schemes. It is then shown that this restriction will not undermine the asymptotical performance of IED. Another step of practical design of IED schemes is to make the computational complexity incurred by encoding and decoding feasible. In the framework of linear IED, a scheme can be conveniently described by parity check matrices. Then we get an interesting trade-off between the density of the associated parity check matrices and the resulting symbol error probability. To implement the idea of linear IED and follow the instinct provided by the result above, Low Density Parity Check(LDPC) codes and Belief Propagation(BP) decoding are utilized. A successive LDPC code is proposed, and a new BP decoding algorithm is proposed, which applies to the case where the correlation between $Y$ and $X$ can be modeled as a finite state channel. Finally, simulation results show that linear IED schemes are indeed superior to SW coding schemes.

Near lossless source coding with side information only at the decoder, was first considered by Slepian and Wolf in 1970s, and rediscovered recently due to applications such as sensor network and distributed video coding. Suppose X is a source and Y is the side information. The coding scheme proposed by Slepian and Wolf, called SW coding, in which information only flows from the encoder to the decoder, was shown to achieve the rate H(X|Y) asymptotically for stationary ergodic source pairs, but not for non-ergodic case, shown by Yang and He. Recently, a new source coding paradigm called interactive encoding and decoding(IED) was proposed for near lossless coding with side information only at the decoder, where information flows in both ways, from the encoder to the decoder and vice verse. The results by Yang and He show that IED schemes are much more appealing than SW coding schemes to applications where the interaction between the encoder and the decoder is possible. However, the IED schemes proposed by Yang and He do not have an intrinsic structure that is amenable to design and implement in practice. Towards practical design, we restrict the encoding method to linear block codes, resulting in linear IED schemes. It is then shown that this restriction will not undermine the asymptotical performance of IED. Another step of practical design of IED schemes is to make the computational complexity incurred by encoding and decoding feasible. In the framework of linear IED, a scheme can be conveniently described by parity check matrices. Then we get an interesting trade-off between the density of the associated parity check matrices and the resulting symbol error probability. To implement the idea of linear IED and follow the instinct provided by the result above, Low Density Parity Check(LDPC) codes and Belief Propagation(BP) decoding are utilized. A successive LDPC code is proposed, and a new BP decoding algorithm is proposed, which applies to the case where the correlation between $Y$ and $X$ can be modeled as a finite state channel. Finally, simulation results show that linear IED schemes are indeed superior to SW coding schemes.

This thesis examines the identity of the U.S. military personnel (the Marines) through their perceptions of a war television series, Generation Kill. The thesis sampled 38 respondents through an online questionnaire. The thesis uses the encoding and decoding theory to reveal that the Marine respondents demonstrated multiple interpretations of themes and concepts in the official discourses. The negotiated decoding from the respondents shows an interchangeable nature of the concepts that the official discourses and the informal conducts are integral to each other. The thesis makes use of the details in GK to draw out the grunts’ experience of being a Marine. In the end, it shows the Marine identity experienced by individual members is diverse and multilayered, and the identity could be shaped and negotiated. The research not only contributes to the missing research on professional subcultures in audience reception studies, but also engages an interdisciplinary exploration on issues about the military in democratic societies.

Although efforts have been made by the Afghan government and its international partners to promote the tents of gender equality in Afghan society, biases against women and other marginalized groups persist in the society and media sector, particularly. The current study is a timely research because feminist media studies are an under-researched field in the context of Afghanistan. My research aims to be a contribution to this field and open a path for Afghan feminist media studies. The current study explores the representations of gender relations in transnational television soap operas broadcast on Afghan television stations, audiences’ decoding of the representations, and the role of the media in promoting social change. The selected soap operas for the study are Paiman and Qesay Maa, Turkish television soap operas dubbed in the Dari language. The current study is based on feminist theory and feminist methodology, providing a balance of content and reception analysis. Drawing on feminist media studies and focusing on media representations, the content analysis of transnational soap operas echoed previous studies on representations of gender relations and indicated that gender relations are often portrayed in stereotypical and traditional manners. The content analysis further demonstrated that women are objectified in different ways and are often represented as domestic, passive, selfless beings in men’s service. Moreover, relationships between women are often based on rivalry, hatred, and shaming and often without any particular reason. The study also found that contrary to women, men are often represented at outdoor and professional settings. Additionally, grounded on encoding/decoding model through a feminist lens, the thematic analysis of focus group discussions demonstrated that audiences constantly interact with media text and actively make meaning. Interestingly, FGD findings further indicated that as active viewers, both female and male participants, derive multiple and often diverse meanings from the media text. Although both female and male participants problematize the content of transnational soap operas, their interpretations of representations of gender relations and gender equality are dissimilar. The study concludes that transnational soap operas, and the media in general, can play an important role in promoting social change in Afghanistan, particularly gender parity through the Entertainment-Education strategy. However, an intersectional framework is essential in designing EE programmes for promoting gender equality in a diverse society like Afghanistan.

In the development of digital communication and information theory, every channel decoding rule has resulted in a revolution at the time when it was invented. In the area of information theory, early channel coding theorems were established mainly by maximum likelihood decoding, while the arrival of typical sequence decoding signaled the era of multi-user information theory, in which achievability proof became simple and intuitive. Practical channel code design, on the other hand, was based on minimum distance decoding at the early stage. The invention of belief propagation decoding with soft input and soft output, leading to the birth of turbo codes and low-density-parity check (LDPC) codes which are indispensable coding techniques in current communication systems, changed the whole research area so dramatically that people started to use the term "modern coding theory'' to refer to the research based on this decoding rule. In this thesis, we propose a new decoding rule, dubbed jar decoding, which would be expected to bring some new thoughts to both the code performance analysis and the code design. Given any channel with input alphabet X and output alphabet Y, jar decoding rule can be simply expressed as follows: upon receiving the channel output y^n ∈ Y^n, the decoder first forms a set (called a jar) of sequences x^n ∈ X^n considered to be close to y^n and pick any codeword (if any) inside this jar as the decoding output. The way how the decoder forms the jar is defined independently with the actual channel code and even the channel statistics in certain cases. Under this jar decoding, various coding theorems are proved in this thesis. First of all, focusing on the word error probability, jar decoding is shown to be near optimal by the achievabilities proved via jar decoding and the converses proved via a proof technique, dubbed the outer mirror image of jar, which is also quite related to jar decoding. Then a Taylor-type expansion of optimal channel coding rate with finite block length is discovered by combining those achievability and converse theorems, and it is demonstrated that jar decoding is optimal up to the second order in this Taylor-type expansion. Flexibility of jar decoding is then illustrated by proving LDPC coding theorems via jar decoding, where the bit error probability is concerned. And finally, we consider a coding scenario, called interactive encoding and decoding, and show that jar decoding can be also used to prove coding theorems and guide the code design in the scenario of two-way communication.

In the development of digital communication and information theory, every channel decoding rule has resulted in a revolution at the time when it was invented. In the area of information theory, early channel coding theorems were established mainly by maximum likelihood decoding, while the arrival of typical sequence decoding signaled the era of multi-user information theory, in which achievability proof became simple and intuitive. Practical channel code design, on the other hand, was based on minimum distance decoding at the early stage. The invention of belief propagation decoding with soft input and soft output, leading to the birth of turbo codes and low-density-parity check (LDPC) codes which are indispensable coding techniques in current communication systems, changed the whole research area so dramatically that people started to use the term "modern coding theory'' to refer to the research based on this decoding rule. In this thesis, we propose a new decoding rule, dubbed jar decoding, which would be expected to bring some new thoughts to both the code performance analysis and the code design. Given any channel with input alphabet X and output alphabet Y, jar decoding rule can be simply expressed as follows: upon receiving the channel output y^n ∈ Y^n, the decoder first forms a set (called a jar) of sequences x^n ∈ X^n considered to be close to y^n and pick any codeword (if any) inside this jar as the decoding output. The way how the decoder forms the jar is defined independently with the actual channel code and even the channel statistics in certain cases. Under this jar decoding, various coding theorems are proved in this thesis. First of all, focusing on the word error probability, jar decoding is shown to be near optimal by the achievabilities proved via jar decoding and the converses proved via a proof technique, dubbed the outer mirror image of jar, which is also quite related to jar decoding. Then a Taylor-type expansion of optimal channel coding rate with finite block length is discovered by combining those achievability and converse theorems, and it is demonstrated that jar decoding is optimal up to the second order in this Taylor-type expansion. Flexibility of jar decoding is then illustrated by proving LDPC coding theorems via jar decoding, where the bit error probability is concerned. And finally, we consider a coding scenario, called interactive encoding and decoding, and show that jar decoding can be also used to prove coding theorems and guide the code design in the scenario of two-way communication.

Present-day and future network protocols that include and implement Forward Error Correction are configurable by internal parameters, typically incorporating expert knowledge to set up.We introduce a framework to systematically, objectively and efficiently determine parameters for Random Linear Network Codes (RLNC). Our approach uses an unbiased, consistent simulator in an optimization loop and utilizes a customizable, powerful and extendable parametric loss function. This allows to tailor existing protocols to various use cases, including ultra reliable, low latency communication (URLLC) codes. Successful configurations exploring the search space are under evolutionary pressure and written into a database for instant retrieval. We demonstrate three examples, Full Vector Coding, tail RLNC, and PACE with different focus for each.

Nationer är komplexa varumärken i kontrast till organisationers eller företags varumärken. De omfattar en rad aspekter såsom exempelvis turism, näringsliv och politik. Trots det, är det minst lika viktigt för ett land att skapa ett gott rykte kring sitt varumärke. Att sponsra en film är ett av alla tillvägagångssätt att nå ut med sitt varumärke till omvärlden. Det gjorde Singapores turistnämnd, när de sponsrade filmen Crazy Rich Asians. Hollywoodfilmen släpptes år 2018 och blev en succé i många länder. Denna studie har undersökt på vilket sätt en geografiskt distanserad publik tolkat landets varumärke genom filmen. Syftet med studien är att framhäva på vilket sätt en geografiskt distanserad publik tolkar ett nationsvarumärke i film. Fem svenska studenter deltog i en fokusgrupp. Studien kom fram till att (1) Singapores varumärke uppmärksammades tydligt av en geografiskt distanserad publik genom filmen, men att (2) vissa singaporianska kulturer och traditioner som framhävs tolkades på ett icke-önskvärt sätt. Studiens resultat understryker vikten av vilken kulturell kontext som filmen presenteras i. / Nations brands are complex in contrast to corporational- or organizational brands. There are numerous different aspects that need to be considered when building a strong nation brand for example within sectors revolving tourism, politics and infrastructure. Sponsoring a movie is one way for a nation to market themselves and reach out to a larger audience worldwide. In 2018 Singapore Tourism Board, STB, sponsored the movie Crazy Rich Asians, a movie that became a Hollywood success worldwide. This study aims to examine in which ways a geographical distanced audience responded to the movie and how their interpretation could help to construct Singapore's brand image. The purpose of the study is to highlight in what way a geographically distanced audience read a nation brand trough film. Five Swedish students participated in a focus group discussion on this matter after watching the movie Crazy Rich Asians. The study reveals that (1) a geographically distanced audience did create a brand image of Singapore through the movie. (2) Some of the Singaporean cultures and traditions that exposed in the movie were not read in a desirable way. The result of the study highlights the importance of which culture context a movie is presented in.