On the afternoon of June 22nd, the IEEE ComSoc WTC Air-Space-Ground Integrated Communication Series Special Report (Phase 1) was held in the form of  online conference. The speaker of the report was Professor Vincent Y. F. Tan of the National University of Singapore, with the topic "On the Maximum Size of Block Codes Subject to a Distance Criterion”. A total of more than 50 teachers and students from related fields participated in the report. Prof. Zhou Lin presided over the report.

In the report, Prof. Tan first introduced the block codes and the relationship between the distance criterion and the coding rate, and reviewed the classical Gilbert-Varshamov (GV) bound. Then, Prof. Tan carefully explained the method of constructing the optimal coding scheme under the arbitrary distance criterion, and explained the detailed process for the case of discrete and continuous sources. Prof. Tan further conducted a second-order and large deviation asymptotic analysis of the main results, and revealed the performance of the optimal coding scheme from different perspectives.

In the Q&A session, Prof. Tan patiently and meticulously answered many questions raised by the teachers and students, and conducted in-depth exchanges and discussions with the participants.

【Brief introduction of the speaker】

Vincent Y. F. Tan (S'07-M'11-SM'15) was born in Singapore in 1981. He received the B.A. and M.Eng. degrees in electrical and information science from Cambridge University in 2005, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2011. He is currently a Dean's Chair Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore (NUS ). His research interests include information theory, machine learning, and statistical signal processing.

Dr. Tan is an elected member of the IEEE Information Theory Society Board of Governors. He was an IEEE Information Theory Society Distinguished Lecturer from 2018 to 2019. He received the MIT EECS Jin-Au Kong Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Prize in 2011, the NUS Young Investigator Award in 2014, the Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF) Fellowship (Class of 2018), the Engineering Young Researcher Award in 2018, and the NUS Young Researcher Award in 2019. A dedicated educator, he was awarded the Engineering Educator Award in 2020 and 2021 and the (university level) Annual Teaching Excellence Award in 2022. He is currently serving as a Senior Area Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and as an Associate Editor in Machine Learning and Statistics for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.