printable version'Golden years of information theory' to be first subject of inaugural Kailath lecture
BY DAWN LEVY
Robert G. Gallager
Thomas Kailath
To honor the influence and contributions of Professor Thomas Kailath—who directed the Information Systems Laboratory during a period of rapid growth from 1971 to 1980 and who celebrates his 70th birthday this month—former students and colleagues have established an endowment to support an annual lecture, as well as colloquia, workshops and other research-enhancing activities.
MIT Professor Emeritus Robert G. Gallager will deliver the first Kailath Lecture, titled "The Golden Years of Information Theory," at 3 p.m. June 9 in Room 201 of the William R. Hewlett Teaching Center. The event is free and open to those who register before June 5. To register and obtain more information, go to http://isl.stanford.edu/kailath/.
Gallager is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. His many awards include the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' 1983 Information Theory Society Shannon Award "for consistent and profound contributions to information theory," its 1990 Medal of Honor "for fundamental contributions to communications coding techniques" and the 2002 Eduard Rhein Prize for Basic Research, Germany, "for his basic work and fundamental contributions to information theory, coding theory, to mobile communications and to the theory of communication networks."
A colloquium, also held June 9 in Hewlett 201, begins at 9:30 a.m. with talks from Stanford Professors John Cioffi ("Dynamic Spectrum Management") and Arogyaswami Paulraj ("Space-Time Wireless: From Theory to Application") and UCLA Professor Vwani Roychowdhury ("Information Systems Beyond Electrical Engineering").
At 2 p.m., Kailath, the first holder of the Hitachi America Professorship in Engineering, will answer questions about his research, which emphasized information theory and communications in the '60s; linear systems, estimation and control in the '70s; very large scale integration design and sensor array signal processing in the '80s; and applications to semiconductor manufacturing and digital communications in the '90s. He concurrently contributed to several fields of mathematics, especially stochastic processes, operator theory and linear algebra.