The theories of computing (Turing, ~1930s) and communication (Shannon, Hamming ~1940s) have had a profound impact of the development of the two fields and the resulting technologies have drastically altered our lives today. Part of the success of the two theories can be attributed to a clean separation of the computing elements from the communicating elements. Today, however, communication and computing are coming ever closer together, often leaving the human out of the loop. This merger is posing new challenges, definitional and algorithmic, to the theory of communication. In this talk I will describe some of the concrete challenges that we have looked at. I will also describe our attempts at modelling these problems and, in some cases, describe some preliminary solutions.

Madhu Sudan received his Bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at New Delhi in 1987 and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992. From 1992-1997 he was a Research Staff Member at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. In 1997, he moved to MIT where he is now the Fujitsu Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and as Associate Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2003-2004, and a Guggenheim Fellow from 2005-2006.

Madhu Sudan's research interests include computational complexity theory, algorithms and coding theory. He is best known for his works on probabilistic checking of proofs, and on the design of list-decoding algorithms for error-correcting codes. He has served on numerous program committees for conferences in theoretical computer science, and was the program committee chair of the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity '01, and the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science '03. He is the chief editor of Foundations and Trends in Theoretical Computer Science, a new journal publishing surveys in the field. He is currently a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of the ACM and the SIAM Journal on Computing. Previously he served on the boards of the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, Information and Computation, and the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

In 2002, Madhu Sudan was awarded the Nevanlinna Prize, for outstanding contributions to the mathematics of computer science, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing. Madhu Sudan's other awards include the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award (1992), the IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award (2000) and the Godel Prize (2001), Distinguished Alumnus Award of the University of California at Berkeley (2003), and Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology at Delhi (2004).