Communicating Computers vs. Computing Communicators: Crying out for a new theory? Madhu Sudan Microsoft Research New England The theories of computing (Turing, ~1930s) and communication (Shannon, Hamming ~1940s) have had a profound impact of the development of the two fields and the resulting technologies have drastically altered our lives today. Part of the success of the two theories can be attributed to a clean separation of the computing elements from the communicating elements. Today, however, communication and computing are coming ever closer together, often leaving the human out of the loop. This merger is posing new challenges, definitional and algorithmic, to the theory of communication. In this talk I will describe some of the concrete challenges that we have looked at. I will also describe our attempts at modelling these problems and, in some cases, describe some preliminary solutions.