In recognition of the winners of the prestigious Marconi International Fellowship award in telecommunications and information technology, a distinguished group of industry, government and academic leaders and pioneers will gather on the campus of Columbia University on Tuesday, Oct. 10 to discuss future trends in information technology and news.

Dr. George Heilmeier, inventor, engineer, former head of Bellcore, and a founding member of the Marconi Foundation, will begin the program at 4:30 P.M. at Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science (Davis Auditorium, Room 412, Schapiro Center, 530 West 120th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue) with a talk titled: "From Pots to Pans.com: Thoughts and Predictions About Information and News for this Decade and Beyond." The event is open to the public.

The forum is held to honor this year's winners of the Marconi International Fellowships, the foremost prize in telecommunications and information technology. For 2000, Whitfield Diffie of Sun Microsystems and Martin Hellman of Stanford University will share the $100,000 prize for their mathematical formulations nearly 25 years ago that unleashed the key to private communications and secure transactions on the Internet. The two men, whose breakthrough in public key cyptography has been called the "sealing wax" of the information age, will be honored at a reception and dinner following the forum.

Heilmeier's presentation will be followed by discussion by a panel of experts and notables in the audience, including telecommunications pioneers and industry leaders. They include Columbia Engineering Dean Zvi Galil, an expert on cryptography; Dean Thomas Goldstein of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism; Professor John Pavlik, Director of the New Media Center at the Columbia Journalism School; the 2000 Marconi Fellowship honorees, Diffie and Hellman; visiting professor Michael Noll of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information; Professor James Massey of the Institute of Technology in Zurich; and past Marconi Fellows Sir Eric Ash of the University of London (for leadership in electronic technology); Leonard Kleinrock (for pioneering work in computer networks), and Paul Baran of Interfax (for packet switching and other communications advances).