THOMAS M. COVER, PHD, is Professor in the departments of electrical engineering and statistics, Stanford University. A recipient of the 1991 IEEE Claude E. Shannon Award, Dr. Cover is a past president of the IEEE Information Theory Society, a Fellow of the IEEE and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Science. He has authored more than 100 technical papers and is coeditor of Open Problems in Communication and Computation.

JOY A. THOMAS, PHD, is the Chief Scientist at Stratify, Inc., a Silicon Valley start-up specializing in organizing unstructured information. After receiving his PhD at Stanford, Dr. Thomas spent more than nine years at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Dr. Thomas is a recipient of the IEEE Charles LeGeyt Fortescue Fellowship.