  We construct error correcting codes for jointly transmitting a finite set of
independent messages to an 'informed receiver' which has prior knowledge of the
values of some subset of the messages as side information. The transmitter is
oblivious to the message subset already known to the receiver and performs
encoding in such a way that any possible side information can be used
efficiently at the decoder. We construct and identify several families of
algebraic error correcting codes for this problem using cyclic and maximum
distance separable (MDS) codes. The proposed codes are of short block length,
many of them provide optimum or near-optimum error correction capabilities and
guarantee larger minimum distances than known codes of similar parameters for
informed receivers. The constructed codes are also useful as error correcting
codes for index coding when the transmitter does not know the side information
available at the receivers.
