The papers in this volume are the contributions to a special workshop on problems in communication and computation conducted in the summers of 1984 and 1985 in Morristown, New Jersey, and the summer of 1986 in Palo Alto, California. The structure of this workshop was unique: no recent results, no surveys. Instead, we asked for outstanding open prob- problems in the field. There are many famous open problems, including the question P = NP?, the simplex conjecture in communication theory, the capacity region of the broadcast channel, and the two-helper problem in information theory.