Claude E. Shannon devoted the inaugral "Shannon Lecture" at the 1973 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) to the role of feedback in communications, implicitly challenging other information theorists to get to work on this topic. Peter Elias based his Shannon Lecture at the 1977 ISIT on the binary erasure channel (in which a transmitted binary digit is either received error-free or as an erasure symbol), which he described as the simplest channel that incorporates the essential features of "noisiness". Our aim in this lecture is to take up Shannon's challenge by following Elias's suggestion that the binary erasure channel is a good place to start. We will be led naturally to consider data transmission systems that yield zero-errors, i.e., not just a low probability of error but no errors at all. Shannon already in 1956 defined the zero-error capacity of a channel as the upper limit of rates at which zero-error transmission is possible, but paradoxes that occur when this definition is applied to the binary erasure channel will force us to expand this concept. Elias in 1955 introduced infinite-constraint- length codes in a paper that gave birth to "convolutional codes". We find that new paradoxes occur for zero-error transmission when infinite-constraint-length codes are allowed. Resolving all these paradoxes leads to a taxonomy of channels in which the binary erasure channel occupies a prominent place.



Biography of James L Massey:
James L. Massey served on the faculties of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana (1962-1977), the University of California, Los Angeles (1977-1980), and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zürich (1980-1998), where he now hold emeritus status. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at the University of Lund, Sweden, and at the Danish Technical University, Lyngby.

He has served the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory as Editor and as Associate Editor for Algebraic Coding and the Journal of Cryptology as an Associate Editor. He is a past President of the IEEE Information Theory Society and of the International Association for Cryptologic Research.

Massey was a founder of Codex Corporation (later a division of Motorola) and of Cylink Corporation (now a subsidiary of SafeNet).

His awards include the 1988 Shannon Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society, the 1992 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal "for contributions to the theory and practical implementation of forward-error-correcting codes, multi-user communications, and cryptographic systems; and for excellence in engineering education", the l987 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award (joint with P. Mathys) for the "most outstanding paper reporting original work in the Transactions, Journals, and Magazines of IEEE Societies or in the Proceedings of the IEEE", and the 1999 Marconi International Fellowship, and the 2004 IEEE Information Theory Society Distinguished Service Award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences, a member emeritus of the U. S. National Academy of Engineering, an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Science, a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.