Introduction to Coding and Information Theory Society in Korea

Coding and information theory is now regarded as to consist of key technological basis for the electrical engineering and communication by world's most renowned researchers and developers. Especially, the theory of error correcting codes provides an essential solution to the design and analysis of such familiar systems as CD player, Digital TV, mobile and satellite communication systems, and the like. Theoretical area such as cryptography and the study of pseudo-noise sequences are now most interesting to the system designers as they are used more and more widely and essentially for the security and performance improvement.

While there has been no academic society in Korea which concentrates on the research and dissemination of the current results on coding and information theory, IEEE has had ITS (Information Theory Society) for more than 30 years as one of truly academic and theoretical society for the contribution to electrical engineering and communication, among many others, and huge amount of world's famous researchers are actively working on this area and interchanging their up-to-date results.

Here, the coding and information theory society has been born under the auspice of KICS (Korea Institute of Communication Sciences) in the beginning of 1996 with about 30 active working members from both various universities and industry around the nation. Specific area of interest are : error correction codes, information theory, source coding, coded modulation, discrete mathematics, cryptography, sequence and signal design, and related fields. Major activities of the society include (1) The coding and information theory workshop, three times a year, all of the presentations are collected for the year end publication as a proceedings, (2) A three-day course on error correcting codes in February every year, and (3) the participating society in JCCI (Joint Conference on Communication and Information) in April every year. One of the blue print of our members is to hold a Korean-Japanese joint conference on coding and information theory in the near future. In 1997, the society has been approved as the IEEE Korean Chapter for Information Theory Society, and now all the activities of the society are reported to IEEE ITS, and it has become possible to invite some international conferences under the sponsorship of IEEE. So far, two volumes of the proceedings and two lecture notes for the three-day short course on ECC have been published, and numerous research results have been presented in the coding and information theory sessions in various KICS conferences and JCCI.

For any query regarding the society, please contact Prof. Habong Chung, Chair of CITS at 02-312-1031 (e-mail: habchung@wow.hongik.ac.kr) or Prof. Hong-Yeop Song, Treasurer of CITS at 02-361-4861 (e-mail: hysong@bubble.yonsei.ac.kr). Korean version of WWW homepage has been under the construction at http://calab.yonsei.ac.kr/~hysong/cits/intro-cits.html which awaits your visits.