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.

Table of Contents:
1 Introduction.- 2 Norbert Wiener and the development of Mathematical Engineering.- I Communication and Information Systems.- 3 Residual noise after interference cancellation on fading multipath channels.- 4 Generalized decision-feedback equalization for packet transmission with ISI and Gaussian noise.- 5 Packet radio multiple access.- 6 The evolution of mobile communications.- 7 Blind equalization and smart antennas.- 8 Complexity management: a major issue for telecommunications.- II Mathematics and Computation.- 9 Horizontal, vertical, especially diagonal.- 10 Fast inversion of Vandermonde and Vandermonde-like matrices.- 11 Improving the accuracy of the generalized Schur algorithm.- 12 Displacement structure: two related perspectives.- 13 Structured total least squares for Hankel matrices.- 14 J—Lossless conjugation for discrete-time systems and its sequential structure.- 15 Semidefinite programming relaxations of non-convex problems in control and combinatorial optimization.- 16 Cooperative cleaners: a study in ant robotics.- 17 Fundamental issues in atomic/nanoelectronic computation.- III Linear Systems and Control.- 18 Building special linear system realizations of special transfer functions.- 19 Generic eigenvalue assignability by real memoryless output feedback made simple.- 20 Fundamental limitations of control system performance.- 21 LQG control with communication constraints.- 22 Modeling, identification and control.- 23 Identification and digital control of very flexible mechanical systems.- 24 Frequency-selective dynamic modeling: experiences in power systems and power electronics.- IV Nonlinear Systems and Control.- 25 On the nonlinear standard H? problem.- 26 Some aspects of nonlinear black-box modeling in system identification.- 27 A new class ofadaptive nonlinear systems.- 28 Nonlinear control of constrained dynamic systems.- 29 A system theory for production lines.- 30 Simulated annealing approach to group technology.- V Signal Processing.- 31 Speech recognition by machines.- 32 Novel HOS-based approach to stochastic prediction and estimation.- 33 Principal singular vector analysis for separating moving objects in noisy perspective images.- 34 A deterministic analysis for learning algorithms with constant learning rates.- 35 Tomographic deconvolution of echograms.- 36 Antenna arrays in mobile communications.- 37 From sinusoids in noise to blind deconvolution in communications.