Distributed storage systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in the emerging era of Internet of Things. Major internet technology companies employ large-scale distributed storage systems to accommodate the massive amounts of data generated and requested by global users. The need of reliable and efficient storage of immense amounts of data calls for new applications and development of classical error-correcting codes and has motivated a large amount of research in coding theory in the last decade. In particular, codes capable of correcting erasures efficiently have received much attention.

The efficiency of erasure correction for distributed storage systems is often assessed by two performance metrics, bandwidth and locality. In this talk, I will present several results for each of these two metrics. I will first derive some new results for Reed-Solomon codes with optimal communication complexity for erasure correction ("repair bandwidth"), and then describe new families of cyclic codes with locality, extending the range of parameters for which such families were previously known. I will conclude this talk with a few interesting problems and directions for future research.

Zitan Chen received the B.Eng. degree in information engineering from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2015. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park. His main research interests include coding theory, information theory, and related topics in theoretical computer science.