Communications, Computation, Control, and Signal Processing: a tribute to Thomas Kailath

A. Paulraj*, V. Roychowdhury**, and C. Schaper* * Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University ** Dept. of Electrical Engineering, UCLA Innumerable conferences are held around the world on the subjects of commu nications, computation, control and signal processing, and on their numerous subdisciplines. Therefore one might not envision a coherent conference encom passing all these areas. However, such an event did take place June 22-26, 1995, at an international symposium held at Stanford University to celebrate Professor Thomas Kailath's sixtieth birthday and to honor the notable con tributions made by him and his students and associates. The depth of these contributions was evident from the participation of so many leading figures in each of these fields. Over the five days of the meeting, there were about 200 at tendees, from eighteen countries, more than twenty government and industrial organizations, and various engineering, mathematics and statistics faculties at nearly 50 different academic institutions. They came not only to celebrate but also to learn and to ponder the threads and the connections that Professor Kailath has discovered and woven among so many apparently disparate areas. The organizers received many comments about the richness of the occasion. A distinguished academic wrote of the conference being "the single most rewarding professional event of my life. " The program is summarized in Table 1. 1; a letter of reflections by Dr. C. Rohrs appears a little later.