Symposium Report: 1995 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory

Ian F. Blake, Michael B. Pursley and Vijay K. Bhargava

The 1995 IEEE International Symposium (ISIT'95) was held September 17-22 in the Conference Centre at Whistler, British Columbia, Canada. Elwyn Berlekamp was registrant number 600! Along with 65 accompanying guests, ISIT'95 became the largest symposium to date. Altogether 36 countries were represented at ISIT'95 with the largest number from USA (283) followed by Japan (52), Canada (47), Sweden (29) and Germany (20). A record number of students (160) participated in the conference.

The technical program consisted of 450 short papers and 25 long papers. G. David Forney, Jr., presented the Shannon lecture while plenary lectures were given by Brian Marcus, Jacob Ziv, Gilles Brassard and Ingrid Daubechies. A copy of the proceedings can be ordered from: IEEE Service Centre 445 Hoes Lane, P.O. Box 1331 Piscataway, NJ 08855-1331 Phone: 1-800-678-IEEE Financial support from The National Science Foundation, The U.S. Army Research Office and the U.S. Office of Naval Research facilitated the participation of approximately 50 delegates from USA. Financial support was received from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to partially fund the travel of plenary speakers. The conference provided registration waiver and/or accomodation for 12 delegates from "economically disadvantaged" countries.

The symposium got off to a good start with the welcome reception on September 17. This was followed by a "mini" reception on September 18 and a concert given by students from the school of music at the University of Victoria. The program consisted of "Quintet in b minor.op.115" by Johannes Brahms and "Quintet in A major, K.581" by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and was much appreciated by a standing room only audience of around 375. Two excursions and a mountain top picnic were also organized.

The Award Banquet on Thursday September 21 may well go down in the history as one for the ages. IT Society president Bruce Hajek described the new Claude E. Shannon Award and recognized G. David Forney Jr., as the 1995 winner. Bruce noted that past Shannon Lecturers will be recognized as Shannon Award winners. A past "oversight" was corrected by recognizing Mark Pinsker as the 1978 Shannon Award winner. All of them (except Shannon, Slepian and Root) were in attendance and were called to the stage one by one. With all of them on the stage, a prolonged standing ovation followed. We were simply overwhelmed by this extraordinary event!

At ISIT'95, an excellent location, fine weather and many opportunities for stimulating interactions were appreciated by all.

Caption for photographs

Ann, Of the 6 pictures I would like to use number 4 and 5 as part of articles 1 and 7 respectively. the rest go with this article

1. Chris Heegard (left) receiving IEEE Fellow award from IEEE Vice President for Regional Activities-Vijay Bhargava (right). In the centre is Bruce Hajek, IT Society President

2. 1994 Prize paper Award winners, (from left to right) T. R .N. Rao and G. L. Feng

3. 1995 Prize Paper Award winners (from left to right) P. Sole, N. J. A. Sloane, A. R. Calderbank, A. Roger Hammons and P. Vijay Kumar

4. Mark Pinsker receiving the 1978 Shannon Award from Toby Berger TO ACCOMPANY ARTICLE 1 on Page 1

5. Past Shannon Award winners (left to right), Elias, Fano, Pinsker, Peterson, Reed, Gallager, Golomb, Massey, Cover, Viterbi, Berlekamp and Wyner TO ACCOMPANY ARTICLE 6

6. G. David Forney Jr. receiving the 1995 Shannon Award from Bruce Hajek