One of the twin IEEE 1999 Information theory workshops took place from June 20-25, in the beautiful surroundings of the Kruger National Park, South Africa. The organizers of the workshop succeeded in creating ideal circumstances for an inspiring workshop with the general theme: "Information theory and Communications".
The workshop was chaired by Hendrik Ferreira from the Rand Afrikaanse Universiteit and Shu Lin from Hawaii. The technical program chairman was Han Vinck and the local arrangements were taken care of by Walter Pentzhorn, Martie Branders and Francis Swarts. Although the Kruger Park is in an isolated area, the organizers provided excellent facilities for the 110 workshop participants and their 70 spouses. This number of participants was far above any expectations.
The workshop offered many possibilities for game drives in the early morning (06.00!) or in the afternoon after the sessions. Many results on spotting exotic animals like lions, hyenas, leopards elephants etc. were reported by the participants. On Wednesday all participants could participate in the tour through the park or in the tour to the environment of the park. The excursion concluded with a traditional "Braai" where as a dessert the whole kitchen staff gave a superb performance in classical South African singing.
The technical program consisted of the following sessions: modeling and Performance Analysis of High Speed Networks, chaired by Tony Ephremides; Multiuser Communication, chaired by Sergio Verdu and David Tse; Coding and Modulation for Fading Channels, chaired by Ezio Biglieri; Spread-Spectrum Communication, chaired by Michael Pursley; Cryptology and Information Security, chaired by Henk van Tilborg; Source Coding Theory and Techniques, chaired by Frans Willems; Identification, chaired by Te Sun Han and Rudi Ahlswede. The recent result session was organized by Mario Blaum and contained 40 papers in three parallel sessions. The timing for the game drives and the sessions allowed many participants to enjoy both of them and resulted in a high attendance during all the sessions.
As a highlight in the program, one evening session was organized with two plenary speakers: "Deepening Connections between Coding and Cryptography" by Jim Massey and "An Information Spectrum Approach to Information Theory" by Te Sun Han. The proceedings (131 pages) contains a summary of most of the papers and has IEEE Catalog number 99EX253. In conclusion, the Kruger Park showed to be an ideal place for the workshop which was very well organized by the local community.