Founded by Claude Shannon in 1948, information theory has taken on renewed vibrancy with technological advances that pave the way for attaining the fundamental limits of communication channels and information sources. Increasingly playing a role as a design driver, information theory is becoming more closely integrated with associated fields such as coding, signal processing, machine learning and networks. In this talk, I will review its history, current research trends in the field, as well as some of its longstanding open problems.