Fountain Codes are a new class of codes designed for transmission of
data on erasure channels with unknown erasure probabilities. Raptor
codes form a sub-class of Fountain Codes. They allow for linear time
encoding and decoding algorithms. Particulary designed codes from
this class approach the capacity of an unknown erasure channel
arbitrarily closely.

On the theoretical side, I will discuss properties and applications
of these codes as erasure and error-correcting codes, and introduce
their relationship to threshold phenomena in random graphs. On the
practical side, I will introduce some applications of these codes.