Lec 1 | MIT 6.450 Principles of Digital Communications I, Fall 2006

[@karanbhatia6712]

This prof is Robert G. Gallager, the inventor of LDPC codes used in Wifi, Dvds and more recently 5G communication system. This blew my mind! The things I am gonna learn are made by this gentleman itself. This shows why MIT is the top institute in the world.

[@japs13]

One of the few professors, in my experience, who still implements philosophy into his lectures. Great professor.

[@shethtejas104]

I was watching random videos on youtube and wasting my time replying to abusive comments. Then I realized, being a digital communications engineer, why not search related videos. I found M.I.T videos for free. This is what resurrection feels like. Internet CAN be very good too. Depends on how you spend time with it. Thank you MIT :)

[@MichaelRay-h8r]

I realized after this video that I dont have the prerequisite knowledge to do much of this stuff yet. But hearing all the things this man said about theory and the such has given me so much new motivation to do the best I can in my current university courses. I will be back in a few semesters to do this for real, you can count on it!

[@Beatriz-ht4ys]

He's teaching the learner how to think. I LOVE MIT. Please don't be tired to share what's on your imagination.

[@7aydarah]

I'd been watching the series of thos videos in 2009 for studies purpose when I was working on Reed-Muller codes. And now, after 7 years, when I started working on LDPC codes, I realize that this guy is the father of LDPC codes. What an ignorant am I !!!! Thanks a lot Professor Robert Gallager. All my respects.

[@ChrisAldrich1]

@donnyab Yes! Indeed. This is a fairly advanced subject which generally isn't gotten to until one's senior year of university or more often in a master's program. If you want to be prepared to understand it all, you'll need to be able to understand all of those prior subjects. One can always watch the videos and do their best, but if you're going to put in the work, you may as well put in the work.

[@suhailski]

This is a wonderful course. Prof Galleger is such an inspiring and engaging teacher. Two thumbs up!

[@engrumarkhan]

7 Year in wireless communication but still much to learn from Prof Galleger lecture! Thanks

[@shahjahanali9645]

Excellent Lecture by the Great Professor. I wish I had a teacher like him. Long live professor.

[@alirezazaeemzadeh9610]

Really good stuff, if you already have a good background on the subject, which is the target audience of the lectures. Otherwise, I recommend you to first take a look at some of the other ocw materials such as linear algebra, signals and systems, and random processes.

[@cunningshark]

best wishes to this old man, thank you for your work and your humor (btw you are not robbing :D)

[@ggonjon]

Online Education can become extremely boring. We miss the teachers, the tone of voice, the body language. And also those stories that good teachers share with their students. But thanks God for these on-line lectures. They are awesome!

[@MakeSushi1]

I like these videos

[@smfarzaneh]

such a gem! I'm teaching this and these videos are invaluable.

[@notadyhug]

Thumbs up if you think the Prof. looks just like Warren Buffett. Great course, Thanks MIT Open Course Ware!

[@eloymarquez4783]

THANK YOU MIT!!! I use your materials for teaching my students.

[@oneforallah]

while there are great teachers like the ones at mit and good ones like yourself, in India there are just plain crappy, shitty teachers who don't give two shits about generating students interest in the topic. They bring in some 1980's bunch of shit notes they had written and encourage rote-learning. Whats even more interesting is that my classmates all just jump right into the "who can rote learn the most without understanding a damn thing" competition and I'm just plain sad at how potential is wasted in my country due to its crap education system. You try to teach from the best, good for you !

[@mikemcdonald5147]

thats cheating

[@shivamparashar6334]

@@mikemcdonald5147 actually its great

[@footballover01]

he is really a great teacher, and that's wut really makes MIT an excellent place for education :)

[@yukeyang9643]

great thanks to MIT,thank you for sharing these amazing lectures.

[@mastodans]

I enjoy the aside about Hamming at 1:06:08

[@Ankit5311]

lifeChanging perspective on Engineering ::: thank u MIT to share

[@ixisuprflyixi]

I like to listen to this gentleman talk.

[@Sagias]

Really inspiring lecture. He is a great scientist and teacher.

[@Verschlungen]

23:29-23:41 "When you talk about information theory, it's a total misnomer from the beginning. Information theory does not deal with information at all. It deals with data." Thank you!! That made my day. I've been saying exactly that for years, and wondering all the while why this crucial distinction is mentioned nowhere, EXCEPT on the very first page of Shannon's famous technical paper, which nobody reads. Physicists in particular have a way of sailing right past the data/information distinction, presumably because they are smarter than everyone else (true, I don't deny that they are) and so they feel that they needn't ever slow down to wonder if perhaps they aren't spouting very clever but very idiotic nonsense, e.g., about 'the information in a black hole'.

[@marinvorspier7528]

what Shannon's famous technical paper u are taking about? i want to read it too xD

[@Verschlungen]

@@marinvorspier7528 Hi. I was referring to his paper called 'The Mathematical Theory of [data] Communication' (1949), which started out as a technical paper inside Bell Labs in 1948. I put '[data]' in the title to emphasize that his paper is NOT about 'information'! As a small paperback book, look for C.E. Shannon, W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, University of Illinois Press, 1963. Shannon's paper appears on pp. 31-125 of that volume. On the very first page of his paper (p. 31), he says, "These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem." In other words, he is trying to warn the reader that the paper is about the low-level technical details of data communication, not about 'high-level' information stuff. But for 70 years, people have been ignoring his warning and instead have promoted the fairy-tale that there exists "a theory of information" devised "by Shannon." There is no such theory.

[@dmswanson5694]

Actual understanding without of the obfuscating fussy-stuff; that is, both feet on ground, clear vision as is to what is what and why. Actually useful, applicable. Thank you, thank, you, and thank you MIT. Also, I would credit the excellent professor presenter but I can't find his name; still, that particular person, thank you, sir.

[@mitocw]

We glad this lecture helped you! Thanks for the shoutout. :D The Professor's name is Robert Gallager. More info and materials for the course can be seen at MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu/6-450F06.

[@ChrisAldrich1]

You should try working your way through Oppenheim/Wilsky's Signals & Systems and something like John G. Proakis' Digital Signal Processing as preparation to this course. Berkeley has some good video lectures on the Signals and Systems stuff. Having a good background in Probability Theory will be helpful as well.

[@Alaninbroomfield]

It's a fascinating macro-topic. Thanks for posting.

[@AyushBhattfe]

first 20 to 25 mins of this lecture is pure philosophy.

[@ReadWithTshepho]

Philosophy 101. As prof did say that he is a theoritician...that is...philosopher-engineer.

[@jimmybuffet4970]

He was right. Rapid evolution in the telecommunications industry. Gone are GSM, TDMA, CDMA and HSPA. Now, LTE is on the chopping block in the next several years as 5G NR is fully deployed.

[@norliegh]

You were right about 5G NR bands! : )

[@iammouliroy]

I am so motivated after seeing this.. thank you Sir :)

[@kush1161]

thank u MIT...really great thing 4 world u r giving

[@ShuoTan_CS]

Nice lectures, Great Master!

[@hw7channel571]

Great lecture, Author and lecturer.

[@sanjaypatil2532]

Too late, a decade, to this channel :) Watched only 25 mins n i got 2 thinkin bout his statemt "channel does not know what it's transmitting". Back in the days of Telegram and Postal-messages, the messenger knew the message and announced it to the recipient (Happy B'day). Telegraph operators too knew the reason for the calls...what a contrast to the modern day communications. Thought I'd share :)

[@davyboy696]

TVP is point of vacuumtube ET3103 trs. old technology...

[@nathanielkilmer5022]

This was filmed in 2006, the first iPhone was released in 2007.

[@pratiktata3388]

what a pleasant and charming Prof.

[@michaelarson9616]

Woow. thanks from course it halped my busines.

[@vishwapriyagautam8227]

Very enthusiastic spirit

[@yk2901]

this man is amanzing

[@FatimaHassan-fn1vk]

I still dont get the part where he said "theoretists state that 2^100 nos would be evenly spaced and between the values of 0 and 1"Wont the values be exactly zeros and ones and not decimal points?

[@nataliaah5114]

@christopherjaldrich thank you ^^.

[@МиланДимитровски]

it would be great to have subtitles with these amazing lectures! is that in the plan? it would be very useful for me because of my bad english. it is much easier with subtitles. just transcript (without synchronization) would be enough for me! thank you anyway!

[@abkt3839]

Now it has subtitles, 6 years later! Thank you MIT!

[@marinvorspier7528]

​@@abkt3839 im new in this lecture... so thx u MIT xD

[@JoaquimSalaFayos]

Thanks, very good explanation. Regards from Spain!!

[@romoonli2315]

thx,it is what I exactly need,there is nothing in the GFW.

[@tchi38]

Journalism major! Great video :)

[@telecom3480]

thanks MIT

[@pritomsarker8761]

19:20 no claps for this gold here?

[@icmetlist]

Great lecture!!! Thank you for posting.

[@salimabelhadj422]

Great Professor

[@tomlynd8836]

It would be very helpful to add the title of lectures rather than the number.

[@mitocw]

As of May, 2012, all of our videos include the title of the lecture. There are currently no plans to change the thousands of videos before that date.

[@FOC-m6g]

very good lecture...cheers..

[@danishfella]

"If you design a system and you don't see in your mind how the whole thing works, you will end up with something like Microsoft Word. And that's the truth!"

[@1412dante]

and what's wrong with microsoft word?

[@james77011]

Does anyone know what book he is teaching from

[@mutex1024]

Principles of Digital Communication by Gallagher.

[@patnafs]

Brilliant!

[@umarrashid4893]

Good to have some of your best thing to say about Pakistan journal of history of the United states in a shop o a lot more than the first time the first two countries has a function that will check in a lot more information on the other sites

[@mpreyye]

This course scares me

[@mattdistad]

haha he said Jigabits, Great Scott!

[@kbaafi]

this man is just amazing

[@juandefs]

Well.. i guess ill come back once i complete 6.041 then..

[@MakisHMMY]

167k views. Let's assume a student watches 1-2 times this videos, and the median view count is 1.3~1.7 . We then have 100~130 thousand aspiring telecommunications engineers. Let's say there is a tough estimation of 100~5000 big telecom companies out there. Each one must take in around 20~10,000 telecom employees , just from the statistical pool that watched this video, in order for everyone to succeed... Talk about competition, huh?

[@dipankersingh7186]

+Michail Chatzinikolaou and 70-80 k students watched this !

[@KabooM1067]

You're not accounting for the people viewing out of sheer curiosity and interest for the subject, not to pursue it as a career.

[@KabooM1067]

You're not accounting for the people viewing out of sheer curiosity and interest for the subject, not to pursue it as a career.

[@eugeniorivera4818]

more importantly, look at how much it drops off by later lectures

[@kush1161]

great sir

[@nataliaah5114]

I would like to be able to follow this course, but am a bit worried about the prerequisites. Does anyone know of a good course I could take a look at to be ready for this one?

[@belowasmelashgebremariam]

Hasabka bitegbar chigr nayediseb techebatiy kitigebro enteleka ,niseb wediseb ..kemuew malet bitikikil zetechebetu nab chubut kitewelo enteleka

[@ReadWithTshepho]

0 - 1948: Philosophy 101.

[@mohammadkhawaja1476]

23:07 She has COVID kick her out!

[@nangbutinang]

simply a smart ass lecture..may god bless u

[@belowasmelashgebremariam]

Be theory wedikey ayfeltin

[@Er.Sunil.Pedgaonkar]

Good

[@belowasmelashgebremariam]

Thanks but ?

[@belowasmelashgebremariam]

Kemey Asmwlash Eye

[@aravindan07ec04]

What's his name?

[@mitocw]

+Aravind Narayanan This is Prof. Robert Gallager.

[@waldmeister000]

woooooow , I wish to be a PHD student in that professor's class one day .

[@boczarionut1981]

Who can dislike this???

[@belowasmelashgebremariam]

Haha nice talking

[@dsgregg]

I'm not impressed. There are a lot of great ideas about digital communications but this guy ain't got em.

[@nataliaah5114]

@christopherjaldrich thank you ^^.

[@belowasmelashgebremariam]

Hasabka bitegbar chigr nayediseb techebatiy kitigebro enteleka ,niseb wediseb ..kemuew malet bitikikil zetechebetu nab chubut kitewelo enteleka