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A final reminder that nominations for the Shannon, Wyner, and paper awards are due on March 1, 2009.

The BBVA Foundation has awarded the 2008 Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies to Professor Jacob Ziv. Ziv's ground-breaking innovations in data compression have had a deep and lasting impact on both the theory and practice of communications and information technology.

The Women in the Information Theory Society (WITHITS) program has a new website.

The IT Society congratulates 19 Society Members, including 3 members of the Board of Governors, who were elected to the rank of Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»­ Fellow for 2009.

The Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»­ Information Theory Society mourns the loss of Professor Sergio D. Servetto, who passed away on July 24th 2007. He was the sole victim of an accident in a private plane, which he was flying from Michigan to Ithaca, NY.

Five-Page Limit on Correspondences As recommended by the Ad Hoc Committee on the Growth of the Transactions, and unanimously approved by the Board of Governors at ISIT 2006 in Seattle, WA, accepted Correspondence items submitted for review in 2007 and beyond will be limited in length to five printed pages in the Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»­ Transactions on Information Theory. The updated Information for Authors now reflects this change.

On an experimental basis, open reviewing of submissions to the Transactions will be allowed to complement the standard procedure.

ArXiv is a public preprint server (partly funded by the NSF) which in the past decade has become the dominant method for distributing new papers in the physics community, and more recently in substantial parts of math and CS. It has been called the "physics model" for "open access" publication. Recently ArXiv has established an information theory category.

Prof. Sergio Verdú, of Princeton University, has been named the recipient of the 2008 Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»­ Richard W. Hamming Medal, "for fundamental contributions to information theory and the development of multiuser detection".

The Awards Committee, currently chaired by Andrea Goldsmith, strongly encourages all society members to consider nominating papers for the ITSoc or joint ITSoc/COMSOC prize paper awards. To stimulate more award nominations, the deadline has been extended to March 1.

The Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»­ Information Theory Society mourns the loss of David Slepian, who passed away on November 29, 2007. A researcher of immense depth and breadth, Slepian was known for choosing problems of a fundamental nature and providing solutions that paved the way for many to follow.