Communication Theory Technical Committee Meeting
                  ICC'98
Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel, Atlanta, Georgia
             June 9, 1998

1. The meeting was called to order at 5:10 PM by Peter McLane.

2. GLOBECOM'99 Report by Leandro Maciel this conference report
   was moved forward in the agenda to accommodate Leandro's time
   constraint: GLOBECOM'99 will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,
   on 12/5 to 12/9. It will be the first conference to be organized
   in a modular format, i.e., the meeting will consist roughly 70%
   of mini-conferences, and 30% of the traditional, "main" conference.
   The mini-conferences will be called the "symposia" this name
   was chosen based on the fact that "mini-conference" sounds too
   small for travel budget justifications in a number of
   organizations. This is a transitional step toward the future
   "mall of conferences" format, where the "main" conference part
   will disappear.

   GLOBECOM'99 will have 9 symposia:
   - Communication Theory
   - Advanced Signal Processing for Communications
   - Future Wireless Communication Systems
   - Enterprise Applications and Services
   - Multimedia Applications Services, and Technologies
   - Internet Application and Technology
   - High Speed Networks
   - Access Networking
   - General Conference

   There will be a single fee and registration for all symposia.
   The proceeding hard copies may be sold separately for each
   symposium, but all will be included in the proceeding CDs.

   Each Symposium will have one Technical Committee TC of the
   IEEE Communications Society as the primary sponsor, and up to
   about five other TCs as co-sponsors. Each symposium will last
   3 days with 2 sessions per day 6 sessions. Each session will
   have about 7 papers, so each symposium will have a total of 42
   papers.

   Our committee will be the primary and only sponsor of the
   Communication Theory Symposium. We are required to assign a
   technical chairman for this symposium, and to provide 5 or 6
   keywords related to this symposium for the calls for papers
   this is already past due--deadline was a week after ICC'98.
   Accordingly, the committee is seeking nominations for the chair
   of the Communication Theory Symposium for GLOBECOM'99--see Peter
   McLane's recent email dated 6/19. The elected candidate will
   provide keywords for the calls for papers.

   We are also a co-sponsor of the Advanced Signal Processing for
   Communications Symposium, so our committee could create more
   room for accepted papers, by organizing additional sessions in
   the Advanced Signal Processing for Communications Symposium.

   Proposals for session topic areas for GLOBECOM'99 include:
   Multiple Access Techniques--H. Sari
   Turbo Codes
   Multi-User Detection
   Multi-Rate CDMA
   Broadband Equalization--S. Ariyavisitakul
   Space-Time Signal Processing
   OFDM
   Efficient Modulation--M. Flanzbaum
   Diversity Techniques--M. Win

   Comments from committee members regarding GLOBECOM'99:
   - Joe LoCicero outlined the history of the "mall of conferences"
   model. Our committee began organizing the Communication-Theory
   Mini-Conference during GLOBECOM'91. Since then, it has been
   run in every GLOBECOM with success. This success is one of the
   reasons Communications Society wishes to organize future
   GLOBECOMs and ICCs as a collection of mini-conferences.

   This had been motivated by a ground swell of popular
   supports for the mini-conference currently organized by the
   communication theory committee.

   - Zeke Bar-Ness pointed out that the new conference format would
   provide even less room for good communication theory papers,
   compared to the current situation. This would beat the purpose
   of having mini-conferences--should we request for a second
   symposium and/or more sessions?

   - Andrea Goldsmith brought up the issue of paper classification.
   As a general rule, the authors should specify the symposium
   their papers are intended for. Sessions in the "main" conference
   are to be formed from unspecified papers. It is also important
   to have improved communications between the main and the mini-
   conferences, in terms of trading papers between the session
   organizers in the two conferences.

   Please send your comments regarding the new conference structure
   to lek@research.att.com. These inputs will be forwarded to Technical
   Affairs Committee.

3. Announcements:
   - The committee has received 6 nominations for the 1998 Armstrong
   Award. The nominating committee same as last year consists of
   Peter McLane, Ender Ayanoglu, and Joe LoCicero. Previously,
   Marvin Simon was nominated by our committee and won the 1997
   Armstrong Award.

   - The mandate of current executives Peter McLane, Ender Ayanoglu,
   Lek Ariyavisitakul and Paul Kakaes) will end at GLOBECOM'98.

4. Conference Reports
   ICC '98 Atlanta, 6/7-6/11 E. Sousa, G. Stuber:
   Elvino Sousa addressed the committee. Our committee
   organized 9 sessions, with two sessions co-sponsored by the
   Signal Processing and Communication Electronics Committee.
   Comments/suggestions from members were centering around the
   following 4 issues:
   - Poor session attendance, even no-show's by authors, because
   of SUPERCOMM and Services, Applications and Systems (SAS)
   sessions.
   - Similar sessions running in parallel
   - Registration should accompany camera-ready submission to
     avoid no-show's.
   - Sessions should be synchronized with the time posted
     outside the room to accommodate "session hopping".
   These issues will be brought back to the GLOBECOM/ICC
   Conference Board (GICB) by Gordon Stuber.

   GLOBECOM '98 (Sydney, Australia, 11/8-11/12, 1998) (B. Vucetic
   K. C. Chen, and K. Rose) K. C. Chen addressed the committee.
   There were 1150 submitted papers. The acceptance rate was
   about 60%. 72 sessions were formed 84 sessions including
   the mini-conference. Our committee organized 14 and 1/2
   sessions, with 8 papers in each session. All the tutorial
   proposals sponsored by our committee were approved.
 
   CTMC-7: (Sydney, Nov. 1998) (R. Kennedy and K. Ben-Letaif) 
   Khaled Ben-Letaif reported that everything was going well.
   There were 88 submitted papers, 48 of which were accepted 
   to form 6 sessions. Most of the rejected papers were passed
   to the main conference and got accepted.
 
   The mini-conference will have a separate proceedings book, 
   although the CD-ROM will include all the papers. The 
   registration fee will be 590 Australian dollars for the 
   mini-conference only, and 760 Australian dollars for both 
   the mini- and main conferences.
 
   ICC '99 (Vancouver, Canada, 6/6-6/10, 1999) (P. Ho, 
   A. Yongacoglu, and G. Carie). Guiseppe Caire addressed the
   committee. Vijay Bhargava, the Technical Program Chair for 
   ICC'99, has requested that there be only one TPC from each
   committee, although there can be several TPCs internally.
   Submitted papers will be distributed to technical committees
   (rather than proposed sessions) for review--for our committee,
   all papers will be sent to Paul Ho. Accepted papers will then 
   be allocated to proposed sessions. 
   Session proposals include:
   S. Ariyavisitakul, Equalization)16 L
   U. Mengali, Synchronization)16 L
   G. Raleigh, Information Theory in Time-Varying Channels )16 L
   A. Goldsmith, Shannon-Like Capacity for Wireless)16 L
   G. Raleigh, Space-Time Signal Processing)16 L
   H. Sari, Multiple Access Techniques)16 L
   K. Fazel, Wireless Indoor Communications)16 L
   P. Robertson, Iterative receiver structure)16 L
   Workshop/tutorial proposals should be submitted to Robert
   Matthews by 7/15.
 
   Peter McLane indicated that our committee has been asked to 
   propose SAS sessions to ICC'99. Possible topics could include 
   Turbo Codes (D. Divsalar?) and Multiuser Detection. Despite 
   the possible downside that SAS sessions may pull away people 
   from regular sessions, the majority of the members regarded the 
   SAS participation as an opportunity to improve the "by academic,
   for academic" image of our committee, and to attract more people
   from the industry. Especially, it was noted that SAS will become
   the cores for mini-conferences in the future. The members voted
   almost unanimously for participation.
 
   CTMC-8 (Vancouver, Jun. 1999) Y. Bar-Ness will be the 
   General Chair. This will be the first CTMC to be held at ICC. 
   Information is available on the web.
 
   ICC'2000 (New Orleans) will not be co-located with SUPERCOMM.
   SUPERCOMM will always be held in Atlanta for the next five
   years.
 
   Jerry Gibson announced the IEEE Wireless Communications and
   Networking Conference (WCNC'99) to be held in New Orleans, on
   September 21-25, 1999. Technical program Committee will be
   formed by members of our committee. This conference may or
   may not replace ICUPC in the future (there will be no merging
   of PIMRC and ICUPC).
 
5. Workshop Reports
 
   Workshop '98 (Captiva Island, 4/98) (S. Miller, J. Winters, 
   K. Dominiak): Paul Kakaes reported that the workshop was
   successful.
 
   Workshop '99 (California) (C. Robertson, A. Goldsmith, L. 
   Cimini): Andrea Goldsmith reported that the Workshop will
   be held in the Monterey area similar to Workshop'95. Session 
   proposals include:
   - Iterative techniques--S. Benedetto
   - Adaptive techniques--M. Honig
   - Implementation Software and Impacts--G. Fettweis
   - Network
   - Special Topics
 
   Workshop '00 (Florida TBA) (D. Schilling, R. Pickholtz,
   R. Dominiak)
 
6. Other Business: )l
   ComSoc is seeking its presidency nominations. Zeke Bar-Ness
   proposed that our committee nominate Larry Milstein--Peter
   McLane will look into the possibility.
 
7. Minutes of the meeting at GLOBECOM'97 were approved unanimously.
 

8. The meeting adjourned at 6:58 PM.)l