June 29 - July 4, 1997 the International Symposium on Information Theory took place at the Maritim Hotel and Congress Center in Ulm, Germany. The Chairmen of the symposium were Daniel Costello (Notre Dame), Bernhard Dorsch (Darmstadt), and Han Vinck (Essen) . The number of participants (705 plus 95 spouses from 47 countries) and the number of contributions (560 in 8 parallel sessions) exceeded all expectations. The organization was in the hands of the German Information Theory Chapter with assistance of many local "Ulmer" volunteers. Juergen Lindner (Ulm) was the chairman for local arrangements and Martin Bossert (Ulm) was responsible for finances and registration. Without the contributions of these Ulmer scientists a symposium of this size would not have been possible.
The technical program was organized by the two program chairmen Joachim Hagenauer (Munich) and Henk van Tilborg (Eindhoven). Together with their assistants they solved the problems of getting the reviews in time, the correct version of the submitted papers, copyright forms, etc. A highlight in the regular sessions of the symposium were the Iterative Decoding sessions. The organizers had to make a last minute change in the lecture rooms to accommodate all interested participants.
The Shannon Lectures were delivered by Prof. Imre Csiszar from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Prof. Jacob Ziv from the Technion, Haifa. Prof. Csiszar's lecture was devoted to "Information Theoretic Methods in Probability and Statistics." Prof. Ziv's lecture was entitled "Back from Infinity: A Constrained Resources Approach to Information Theory."
In addition, three plenary speakers were invited to give overviews of their work. This year, the presentations were given by Prof. Peter Landrock from Aarhus University who spoke on "Practical Implementations of Cryptography," Dr. Lawrence Rabiner from AT&T Murray Hill who spoke on "Source Coding for Multimedia," and Prof. Gerhard Frey from Essen University who spoke on "The Way to the Proof of Fermat's Theorem."
Abstracts of the Shannon and plenary lectures in addition to the 560 regular contributions can be found in the proceedings of the symposium (ISBN 0-7803-3956-8 or IEEE Catalog Number: 97CH36074). Werner Henkel and Klaus Huber from the German Telekom took care of the proceedings, the program booklets and all other publicity.
An important aspect of the IT symposium is the social program. Under the inspiring leadership of Robert Schweikert (DLR) a social program and spouse program were developed. The social program included: a get-together; guided walking tour through the old city of Ulm, ending with an organ concert in the famous Ulmer Dom; a game and amusement evening; excursions on Wednesday afternoon; and the traditional banquet where all participants including students were invited. The finishing touch in the social program was given by the fire-brigade of Ehrbach with a "Wasser Musik" at the border of the river Danube.
The accompanying persons program was a special service to the guests and their children. Three volunteers, Inge Bossert, Renate Dorsch and Giocco Lindner took care of this successful, highly appreciated part of the social program.
Thanks to the generous support by the German industry and the IT society, support was given to 90 participants. Rolf Johannesson chairman of the international advisory committee played an important role in specification of the rules and selection of the scientist to be granted. Many scientist from economically disadvantaged countries were enabled to participate in the symposium. Thanks to the central location of Ulm in Europe, many young Eastern-European scientists were present. For them, certainly a unique opportunity.