2007 Jun 21 at 13:30
Humanities Theatre in the Hagey Hall of the Humanities
Dr. Vinton G. Cerf, VP and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google
The Internet has grown dramatically from its initial experimental form (three networks) to a burgeoning world infrastructure of significant value and utility. In this talk, I will survey the current state of the Internet and the technologies that are evolving to support it and raise some issues about technical challenges yet to be faced. We'll go on to look at some problems requiring research to solve and others that represent thorny policy issues of international scope (spam, denial of service attacks, abuses of domain names, fraud, harassment, etc). We will also see how network-oriented applications are becoming very popular both for reliability reasons and also to enable collaborative work. As consumer devices become part of the Internet, we will discover new kinds of network-based services that allow third parties to help users manage their entertainment and work. Finally, we will spend some time on the extension of the Internet to operation across the solar system as a communication infrastructure in support of manned and robotic space exploration.
Biography
Dr. Cerf is vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google. In this role, he is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies to support the development of advanced Internet-based products and services from Google. He is also an active public face for Google in the Internet world.
Widely known as one of the "Fathers of the Internet," Dr. Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. In December 1997, President Clinton presented the U.S. National Medal of Technology to Cerf and his colleague, Robert E. Kahn, for founding and developing the Internet. Kahn and Cerf were named the recipients of the ACM Alan M. Turing award, sometimes called the "Nobel Prize of Computer Science," in 2004 for their work on the Internet protocols.
Dr. Cerf served as founding president of the Internet Society (ISOC) from 1992-1995 and was on the ISOC board until 2000. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, AAAS, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Engineering Consortium, the Computer History Museum and the National Academy of Engineering.
He has received numerous awards and commendations in connection with his work on the Internet, including the Marconi Fellowship, Charles Stark Draper award of the National Academy of Engineering, the Prince of Asturias award for science and technology, the Alexander Graham Bell Award presented by the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf, the Silver Medal of the International Telecommunications Union, and the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, among many others.
He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA and more than a dozen honorary degrees.
In addition to his work on behalf of MCI and the Internet, Dr. Cerf has served as a technical advisor to production for the "Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict" television series and made a special guest appearance on the program in May 1998. He has appeared on television programs NextWave with Leonard Nimoy and on World Business Review with Alexander Haig and Caspar Weinberger. He is also a distinguished visiting scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he is working on the design of an interplanetary Internet.
His personal interests include fine wine, gourmet cooking and science fiction.
All are welcome. Please register, to help us gauge numbers, by emailing vkorody@icr.uwaterloo.ca
To find the Hagey Hall of the Humanities and view parking lots, consult the UW map at: http://www.uwaterloo.ca/map/map.php