Distinguished Professor Lecture: Erik Perrins

University Distinguished Professor Erik Perrins, Ph.D., will present his public inaugural lecture, “Finding the Signal in the Noise: The Hidden Magic of Error Correcting Codes in Deep-Space Radios,” at 5:30 P.M. on Wednesday, November 11, 2026, in the Beren Petroleum Conference Center, Slawson Hall G192. The event is free and open to the public.

Register HERE to attend the event.

ABSTRACT: Radio signals from distant spacecraft arrive on Earth as incredibly faint whispers, buried in noise. Yet from those whispers, we recover photographs, videos, scientific measurements, and the vital data needed to navigate the cosmos.

The foundation for this impressive feat was laid in 1948 by Claude Shannon, who proved that error-correcting codes could enable reliable communication remarkably close to the fundamental limits of information theory. But Shannon never explained how to actually build such codes, he simply proved that they must exist.

For eight decades, communication theorists have chased the challenge of finding, constructing, and deciphering these codes. This talk explores a new frontier for these ideas: aeronautical telemetry, which is the science of collecting measurements from flying vehicles and transmitting them back to the ground. During flight tests of everything from small drones to massive rockets, thousands of sensors must transmit vast amounts of data through harsh and noisy communication channels.

Using the recent Artemis II test flight as a spectacular case study, this presentation tells the story of what happens when we bring deep-space mathematics down to Earth, pushing practical communication ever closer to the limits set by Shannon.

The event will be recorded and posted on the Office of Faculty Affairs website: https://facultyaffairs.ku.edu/distinguished-professors for those who cannot attend in person.