Almost Euclidean subspaces of ell₁^N via expander codes

We give an explicit (in particular, deterministic polynomial time) construction of subspaces X of R^N of dimension (1-o(1))N such that for every element x in X, |x|_1 and N^{1/2} |x|_2 are equivalent up to a factor of (log N)^{log log log N}. If we are allowed to use N^{o(1)} random bits, this factor can be improved to poly(log N). Our construction makes use of unbalanced bipartite graphs to impose local linear constraints on vectors in the subspace, and our analysis relies on expansion properties of the graph. This is inspired by similar constructions of error-correcting codes.