Michael Luby

Michael George Luby is a mathematician and computer scientist, CEO of BitRipple, senior research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), former VP Technology at Qualcomm, co-founder and former chief technology officer of Digital Fountain. In coding theory he is known for leading the invention of the Tornado codes and the LT codes. In cryptography he is known for his contributions showing that any one-way function can be used as the basis for private cryptography, and for his analysis, in collaboration with Charles Rackoff, of the Feistel cipher construction. His distributed algorithm to find a maximal independent set in a computer network has also been influential.

Luby received his B.Sc. in mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975. In 1983 he was awarded a Ph.D. in computer science from University of California, Berkeley. In 1996–1997, while at the ICSI, he led the team that invented Tornado codes. These were the first LDPC codes based on an irregular degree design that has proved crucial to all later good LDPC code designs, which provably achieve channel capacity for the erasure channel, and which have linear time encoding and decoding algorithms. In 1998 Luby left ICSI to found the Digital Fountain company, and shortly thereafter in 1998 he invented the LT codes, the first practical fountain codes. Qualcomm acquired Digital Fountain in 2009. Provided by Wikipedia