blahut3 -- December94
I have been struck by the youth, I should not say youth, but the younger people coming in to information theory. I think the decade of the last ten years, at least in the US, has seen the brightest and strongest crop of people entering in- formation theory that I have seen in my career. So, there is a group of people that are very bright, very strong, and they look at the world in wholly new ways. They grew up electronically. They never had to be taught that Shannon says you can partition the communication problem into the task of coding of a source into bits and the task of channel coding to transmit that string of bits. They grew up knowing that in their blood, whereas for me, it was something that I had to learn. So, these young people are looking at our world in fresh ways. And I cannot predict what they are liable to do in the next few years. As for Sergio's ques- tion about the 50th anniversary, the year 1998, I can make the prediction that the problem of the binary Varshamov- Gilbert bound will still be open. I will make the prediction that 1997 we will have a IEEE Information Theory sympo- sium in Germany, and I will make the prediction that within ten years we will have an IEEE Information Theory symposium here in Moscow.