Venkatesan Guruswami presents a simple, explicit construction of error-correcting codes that have a near-optimal rate vs. error-correction trade-off and are encodable and decodable in linear time. These codes nearly match the "Singleton bound" and thus their rate vs. distance trade-off is essentially optimal, and so is their encoding/decoding time (up to constant factors). Previously known codes over a constant-sized alphabet that approached the Singleton bound (eg. certain algebraic-geometric codes) suffered from complicated constructions and/or high (certainly, super-linear) encoding/decoding complexity. From the Series:CSE Colloquia - 2002