Lectures

You can find the relevant lecture material here. A tentative lecture plan is detailed below. We will add more details as the course progresses.

Working draft of the lecture notes are available here.

You can also find last offering’s recorded video lectures at this YouTube Playlist.

• Week 1 [2025-09-23]
  Course Introduction, Lossless Data Compression Basics
  [slides (pdf)] [demo code]
  
• Week 2 [2025-09-30]
  Review + Introduction to Stanford compression library (SCL)
  [Colab Notebook]
  

  Pre-lecture material from Fall 2023 Website

  1. 2023 Lecture 1 part 2: Introduction to lossless compression
     [notes] [slides-part-1] [slides-part-2] [YouTube] [Quiz]
  2. 2023 Lecture 2: Prefix Free Codes
     [Prefix Free Codes notes] [slides] [YouTube] [Prefix-free Compressor code] [Quiz]
  3. 2023 Lecture 3: Kraft Inequality, Entropy, Introduction to SCL
     [Kraft Inequality notes] [Entropy notes] [slides] [YouTube] [Quiz]
• Week 3 [2025-10-07]
  Review + Canonical Prefix Huffman and Succinct Data Structures
  [slides] [AEP visualization demo]
  

  Pre-lecture material from Fall 2023 Website

  1. 2023 Lecture 4: Huffman Codes
     [Huffman notes] [slides] [YouTube] [Huffman code] [Quiz]
  2. 2023 Lecture 5: Asymptotic Equipartion Property
     [AEP notes] [YouTube] [Typical Set coder] [Block Coding colab] [slides (Huffman extended)] [Quiz]
• Week 4 [2025-10-14]
  Review + extensions of ANS, including rANS and tANS
  [slides] [arithmetic coding demo]
  

  Pre-lecture material from Fall 2023 Website

  1. 2023 Lecture 6: Arithmetic Coding
     [slides] [Arithmetic coding notes] [YouTube] [Arithmetic Entropy Coder code] [Quiz]
  2. 2023 Lecture 7: ANS
     [slides] [ANS notes] [YouTube] [rANS code] [tANS code] [Quiz]
• Week 5 [2025-10-21]
  Review + Extensions and Applications of Context-based Methods
  [slides] [k-order conditional entropy calculator]
  

  Pre-lecture material from Fall 2023 Website

  1. 2023 Lecture 8: Beyond IID distributions: Conditional entropy
     [slides] [Non-IID Sources Notes] [YouTube] [Quiz]
  2. 2023 Lecture 9: Context-based AC & LLM Compression
     [slides] [YouTube] [Context-based coding notes] [probability models code] [arithmetic coding code] [Quiz]
• Week 6 [2025-10-28]
  Guest Lecture on OpenZL by Yann Collet (https://www.linkedin.com/in/yann-collet-5ba1904/)
  [slides] [recording]
  

  Pre-lecture material from Fall 2023 Website

  1. 2023 Lecture 10: LZ and Universal Compression
     [slides] [LZ77 notes] [Practical tips notes] [YouTube] [LZ77 Compressor] [LZ77 Sliding Window] [Quiz]
  2. 2023 Lecture 11: Lossy Compression Basics; Quantization
     [slides] [quantization notes] [YouTube] [quantization colab notebook] [Quiz]
• Week 7 [2025-11-04; 2025-11-06]
  No Lecture on Nov 4 (Election Day), Topics on LZ + Lossy Compression Review on Nov 6
  [recording]
  

  Pre-lecture material from Fall 2023 Website

  1. 2023 Lecture 12: Mutual Information; Rate-Distortion Function
     [slides] [YouTube] [RD notes] [Quiz]
  2. 2023 Lecture 13: Gaussian RD, Water-Filling Intuition; Transform Coding
     [notes] [slides] [YouTube] [Quiz]
• Week 8 [2025-11-11]
  Lossy Compression Review + Side Information (e.g., Slepian-Wolf)
  [JPEG compression demo]
  

  Pre-lecture material from Fall 2023 Website

  1. 2023 Lecture 14: Transform Coding in real-life: image, audio, etc.
     [Slides] [YouTube] [Transform Coding Notebook] [Audio Compression Notebook] [Quiz]
  2. 2023 Lecture 15: Image Compression: JPEG, BPG
     [slides] [YouTube] [Quiz]
• Week 9 [2025-11-18]
  Developments in leanrning-based image compression
  [slides]
  

  Pre-lecture material from Fall 2023 Website

  1. 2023 Lecture 16: Learnt Image Compression
     [slides] [YouTube] [Colab Notebook] [Quiz]
  2. 2023 Lecture 18: Video Compression
     [Video Compression Slides] [YouTube]
• Week 10 [2025-11-25]
  Thanksgiving Break! No Lecture.
  
  
• Week 11 [2025-12-02; 2025-12-04]
  No class on Dec 2; Student Project Presentations on Dec 4
  
  

  Pre-lecture material from Fall 2023 Website

  1. 2023 Lecture 17: Humans and Compression
     [slides] [YouTube] [Quiz] [Conclusion Slides]