Milestone-Proposal:Shannon: Difference between revisions

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N42° 21' 42.711'', W71° 5' 26.025''
N42° 21' 42.711'', W71° 5' 26.025''
|a8=The original building (MIT's building 20) was a temporary plywood structure hastily erected during World War II and it was demolished in 1998. Ray and Maria Stata Center (building 32), where the intended site of the milestone plaque is, is located on the former site of building 20.
|a8=The original building (MIT's building 20) was a temporary plywood structure hastily erected during World War II and it was demolished in 1998. Ray and Maria Stata Center (building 32), where the intended site of the milestone plaque is, is located on the former site of building 20.
|mounting details=The plaque is to be displayed on the ground floor of Dreyfoos Tower in Ray and Maria Stata Center (building 32).  
|mounting details=The plaque is to be displayed on the ground floor of Dreyfoos Tower in Ray and Maria Stata Center (building 32).
|a9=The ground floor of Ray and Maria Stata Center (building 32) is fully accessible to the public.
|a10=Massachusetts Institute of Technology
|a10=Massachusetts Institute of Technology
|a4=Before Shannon’s development of information theory, communication was strictly an engineering discipline, with little scientific theory to back it up.  
|a4=Before Shannon’s development of information theory, communication was strictly an engineering discipline, with little scientific theory to back it up.  

Revision as of 19:56, 29 July 2015


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Docket #:2015-09

This Proposal has been approved, and is now a Milestone


To the proposer’s knowledge, is this achievement subject to litigation?


Is the achievement you are proposing more than 25 years old? Yes

Is the achievement you are proposing within IEEE’s designated fields as defined by IEEE Bylaw I-104.11, namely: Engineering, Computer Sciences and Information Technology, Physical Sciences, Biological and Medical Sciences, Mathematics, Technical Communications, Education, Management, and Law and Policy. Yes

Did the achievement provide a meaningful benefit for humanity? Yes

Was it of at least regional importance? Yes

Has an IEEE Organizational Unit agreed to pay for the milestone plaque(s)? Yes

Has an IEEE Organizational Unit agreed to arrange the dedication ceremony? Yes

Has the IEEE Section in which the milestone is located agreed to take responsibility for the plaque after it is dedicated? Yes

Has the owner of the site agreed to have it designated as an IEEE Milestone? Yes


Year or range of years in which the achievement occurred:

1939-1967

Title of the proposed milestone:

Development of Information Theory, 1939-1967

Plaque citation summarizing the achievement and its significance:

Shannon’s Development of Information Theory, 1939-1967

Claude Elwood Shannon single-handedly laid down the general rules of modern Information Theory, creating the mathematical foundations for a technical revolution. He quantified the notion of information for the first time, and revealed fundamental limits in representation and reliable transmission of information. Today, Information Theory continues to set the stage for the development of communications, data storage and processing, and other information technologies.

200-250 word abstract describing the significance of the technical achievement being proposed, the person(s) involved, historical context, humanitarian and social impact, as well as any possible controversies the advocate might need to review.


IEEE technical societies and technical councils within whose fields of interest the Milestone proposal resides.


In what IEEE section(s) does it reside?

IEEE Boston Section

IEEE Organizational Unit(s) which have agreed to sponsor the Milestone:

IEEE Organizational Unit(s) paying for milestone plaque(s):

Unit: Information Theory Society
Senior Officer Name: Michelle Effros

IEEE Organizational Unit(s) arranging the dedication ceremony:

Unit: Information Theory Society
Senior Officer Name: Michelle Effros

IEEE section(s) monitoring the plaque(s):

IEEE Section: Boston Section
IEEE Section Chair name: Fausto Molinet

Milestone proposer(s):

Proposer name: Gregory Wornell
Proposer email: Proposer's email masked to public

Please note: your email address and contact information will be masked on the website for privacy reasons. Only IEEE History Center Staff will be able to view the email address.

Street address(es) and GPS coordinates in decimal form of the intended milestone plaque site(s):

32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139 Lattitude, Longitude 42.3618641, -71.0905626 N42° 21' 42.711, W71° 5' 26.025

Describe briefly the intended site(s) of the milestone plaque(s). The intended site(s) must have a direct connection with the achievement (e.g. where developed, invented, tested, demonstrated, installed, or operated, etc.). A museum where a device or example of the technology is displayed, or the university where the inventor studied, are not, in themselves, sufficient connection for a milestone plaque.

Please give the address(es) of the plaque site(s) (GPS coordinates if you have them). Also please give the details of the mounting, i.e. on the outside of the building, in the ground floor entrance hall, on a plinth on the grounds, etc. If visitors to the plaque site will need to go through security, or make an appointment, please give the contact information visitors will need.


Are the original buildings extant?

The original building (MIT's building 20) was a temporary plywood structure hastily erected during World War II and it was demolished in 1998. Ray and Maria Stata Center (building 32), where the intended site of the milestone plaque is, is located on the former site of building 20.

Details of the plaque mounting:

The plaque is to be displayed on the ground floor of Dreyfoos Tower in Ray and Maria Stata Center (building 32).

How is the site protected/secured, and in what ways is it accessible to the public?

The ground floor of Ray and Maria Stata Center (building 32) is fully accessible to the public.

Who is the present owner of the site(s)?

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

What is the historical significance of the work (its technological, scientific, or social importance)? If personal names are included in citation, include justification here. (see section 6 of Milestone Guidelines)

Before Shannon’s development of information theory, communication was strictly an engineering discipline, with little scientific theory to back it up.

By 1940, a large number of communication systems exist, major ones including Telegraph, Telephone, AM Radio, Television etc. These systems are very diverse and separate fields emerged to deal with each of them, using their own set of tools and methodologies. For example, it would have been inconceivable that one would be able to send video over a phone line, as is commonplace today with the advent of the modem. Engineers at that time would treat video transmission and telephone technology as separate entities and did not see the connection in the transmission of `information’—a concept that would cross the boundaries of these disparate fields and bind them together.

Shannon was the first one succeeded in quantifying the notion of information and providing a general theory that reveals the fundamental limits in representation and transmission of information. Information theory as proposed by Shannon, in the broadest sense, can be divided into two parts: 1) that of conceptualization of information and the modelling of information sources, and 2) that of reliable transmission of information through noisy channels.

1) Shannon echoed the viewpoint established by Hartley and Winer that the information content of a message has nothing to do with its inherent meaning. Rather, Shannon makes the key observation that the source of information should be modeled as a random process and entropy (average log probability) is proposed as the measure of information content.

The famous Shannon source coding theorem states that the number of bits necessary to uniquely describe any data source can approach the corresponding entropy as closely as desired. This is the best performance one can hope for in lossless compression.

For the case where some error is allowed (lossy compression), Shannon developed the rate-distortion theory, which describes the fundamental trade-off between fidelity and compression ratio.

2) Shannon abstracted the communication problem as shown in Appendix 1, where the ‘channel’ accounts for any corruption of the sent messages during communication and the ‘transmitter’ is used to add redundancy to combat the corruption. This idea is of revolutionary nature in a world where modulation was generally thought of as an instantaneous process and no error-correcting codes had been invented.

He introduced the notion of channel capacity, which is a function of the probabilistic model of the channel, and proves the channel coding theorem: The error rate of data transmitted over a band-limited noisy channel can be reduced to an arbitrarily small amount if the information rate is lower than the channel capacity. This theorem establishes the fundamental limit of reliable communication.

Shannon’s development of information theory establishes a solid foundation for those techniques that determine digital communications: data compression, data encryption and data correction. Today, information theory continues to set the stage for the development of communications, data storage and processing, and other information technologies that are indispensable parts of people’s daily lives.

What obstacles (technical, political, geographic) needed to be overcome?

Before Shannon’s development of information theory, various communication systems exist but are treated with as entirely disparate entities. Without science theory to back it up, communication was more like an art than a hard science it is today. It is Shannon who made the ingenious observation of the connection among various communication systems – the transmission of information – and provided a unified mathematical theory of them.

When talking about ‘information’, one usually thinks about certainty rather than uncertainly. Thus it is conceptually challenging for Shannon to propose the wholly new idea of interpreting information as ‘a measure of choice at the sending end and resolution of uncertainty at the receiving end’.

Shannon came up with the two fundamental theorems that define information theory and have had a tremendous influence on computer science and digital communications, namely that of source coding theorem and channel coding theorem. While the former was believed and accepted immediately, the latter was considered a shocker and refused from the beginning, mainly because a part of the terminology developed by Shannon did not agree with the actual experience.

For instance, he introduced the novel term ‘channel capacity’, where the bandwidth together with the signal-to-noise ratio determines the quality of a transmission channel – a relationship that was not and could not be seen till that moment. One is inclined to think of Thomas S. Kuhn’s hypothesis of paradigmatic changes as they are typical for all theories creating completely new terms or letting old ones appear in a different light. The fact that the theory has finally found its appropriate place is to the credit of a rather small group of people who recognized from the beginning the potential of Shannon’s ideas and put them into practice.

What features set this work apart from similar achievements?


Supporting texts and citations to establish the dates, location, and importance of the achievement: Minimum of five (5), but as many as needed to support the milestone, such as patents, contemporary newspaper articles, journal articles, or chapters in scholarly books. 'Scholarly' is defined as peer-reviewed, with references, and published. You must supply the texts or excerpts themselves, not just the references. At least one of the references must be from a scholarly book or journal article. All supporting materials must be in English, or accompanied by an English translation.

Thesis:

[A1] C.E.Shannon, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, Master's Thesis http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11173/34541425-MIT.pdf?sequence=2

[A2] C.E.Shannon, An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics, Doctoral Thesis http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11174/34541447-MIT.pdf?sequence=2

Scholarly Journal Articles:

[B1] C.E.Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, The Bell System Technical Journal, volume 27, pp.379-423, 623-656, July, October, 1948 http://worrydream.com/refs/Shannon%20-%20A%20Mathematical%20Theory%20of%20Communication.pdf

[B2] C.E.Shannon, Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems, The Bell System Technical Journal, volume 28, pp.656-715, October, 1949 http://netlab.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/files/shannon1949.pdf

[B3] C.E.Shannon, Communication in the Presence of Noise, Proceedings of the IRE, volume 37, No.1, pp. 10-21, January, 1949 http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee104/shannonpaper.pdf

[B4] J.R.Pierce, The Early Days of Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol IT-19, No.1, pp. 3-8, January, 1973 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1054955

[B5] F.Ellersick, A Conversation with Claude Shannon, IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol.22 No.5, May, 1984 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1091957

[B6] Sergio Verdú, Fifty Years of Shannon Theory, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol.44, No. 6, pp. 2057-2078, October, 1998 http://www.princeton.edu/~verdu/reprints/IT44.6.2057-2078.pdf

[B7] Wilfried Gappmair, Claude E.Shannon: the 50th Anniversary of Information Theory, IEEE Communications Magazine, April, 1999 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=755458

[B8] Samuel W. Thomsen, Some Evidence Concerning the Genesis of Shannon's Information Theory, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 40 (2009) 81-91 http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0039368108001143/1-s2.0-S0039368108001143-main.pdf?_tid=ef7f753e-316f-11e5-9091-00000aacb361&acdnat=1437679433_91e28c707ddff6fa12a9cf89ced468e8

Books:

[C1] Paul J. Nahin, The Logician and the Engineer, Princeton University Press, 2012

[C2] James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, Pantheon Books, New York, 2011

News Articles:

[D1] http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/401112/claude-shannon-reluctant-father-of-the-digital-age/

[D2] http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/30/magazine/the-lives-they-lived-claude-shannon-b-1916-bit-player.html

Miscellaneous:

[E1] C.E.Shannon, Letter to Vannevar Bush, February 16, 1939 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/ebooks/bookPdfWithBanner.jsp?fileName=5311546.pdf&bkn=5271069&pdfType=chapter

[E2] John R. Pierce, Looking Back - Claude Elwood Shannon, IEEE Potentials, December 1993 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=282341

[E3] Eugene Chiu, Jocelyn Lin, Brok Mcferron, Noshirwan Petigara, Satwiksai Seshasai, Mathematical Theory of Claude Shannon, 6.933J/STS.420J The Structure of Engineering Revolutions, MIT, 2001 http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2001/Shannon1.pdf

[E4] Ioan James FRS, Claude Elwood Shannon: 30 April 1916 - 24 February 2001, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society http://rsbm.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/roybiogmem/55/257.full.pdf?

[E5] Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, The Historic Conceptualization of Information: A Critical Survey, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 30(1), 66-81 http://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/courses_readings/phil123-net/intro/Geoghegan_HistoriographicConception_information.pdf

Supporting materials (supported formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, DOC): All supporting materials must be in English, or if not in English, accompanied by an English translation. You must supply the texts or excerpts themselves, not just the references. For documents that are copyright-encumbered, or which you do not have rights to post, email the documents themselves to ieee-history@ieee.org. Please see the Milestone Program Guidelines for more information.


Please email a jpeg or PDF a letter in English, or with English translation, from the site owner(s) giving permission to place IEEE milestone plaque on the property, and a letter (or forwarded email) from the appropriate Section Chair supporting the Milestone application to ieee-history@ieee.org with the subject line "Attention: Milestone Administrator." Note that there are multiple texts of the letter depending on whether an IEEE organizational unit other than the section will be paying for the plaque(s).

Please recommend reviewers by emailing their names and email addresses to ieee-history@ieee.org. Please include the docket number and brief title of your proposal in the subject line of all emails.