October 2001

From University of California - San Diego

Shannon Symposium live webcast

San Diego--The Shannon Symposium, organized by Jacobs School of Engineering professor Jack Wolf in honor of the late “father of information theory,” Claude E. Shannon, will be streamed live to the Internet from the University of California, San Diego October 15-16. Fifteen world-renowned thinkers and practitioners of information theory and related disciplines will make presentations, among them Qualcomm co-founder Andrew Viterbi, Toby Berger of Cornell University, Thomas Cover of Stanford University, MIT’s G. David Forney Jr., Elwyn Berlekamp of UC Berkeley, and Paul Siegel, director of UCSD’s Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR), where the conference will take place.

The complete list of speakers and presentation topics is available at
http://www.calit2.net/events/shannon_01.html.
To access the symposium in real-time starting at 9 a.m. Monday, October 15 through noon Tuesday, October 16, go to
http://www.calit2.net/events/shannon_10-01.html.

Claude Shannon is widely credited with originating the theories on which digital communications and information storage are based—theories that were fundamental to the development of products such as wireless phones and CD players. He did most of his pioneering work in the 1940s and 1950s, but the implications of his research are even more relevant fifty years later. Yet when he died last February, Shannon was virtually unknown to the public at large. “Engineers think of Shannon the way most people think of Albert Einstein,” says symposium organizer Wolf. “It is unlikely that you’ll see another gathering of information theorists of this stature all in one place. They want to pay tribute to Shannon, and we also hope that the presentations and discussions will result in a road-map to the next frontier of the information revolution.”

The symposium will be followed, at 2 p.m. on October 16, by the dedication of a statue of Claude E. Shannon, in the lobby of the CMRR building on the UCSD campus. The keynote speaker at the dedication ceremony will be Irwin Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm Inc. Also slated to make remarks at the dedication ceremony are symposium organizer Jack Wolf; UCSD vice chancellor Marsha Chandler; Jacobs School dean Robert Conn; sculptor Eugene Daub; and Larry Smarr, director of Cal-(IT)2–the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a collaboration of UCSD and UC Irvine. According to the plaque on the statue, Shannon was cited because “his formulation of the mathematical theory of communication provided the foundation for the development of data storage and transmission systems that launched the information age.”