Vinton G. Cerf
speaker
Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He contributes to global policy development and continued spread of the Internet. Widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,” Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. He has served in executive positions at MCI, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and on the faculty of Stanford University. Vint Cerf served as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2000-2007 and has been a Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1998. Cerf served as founding president of the Internet Society (ISOC) from 1992-1995. Cerf is a Foreign Member of the British Royal Society and Swedish Academy of Engineering, and Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Engineering Consortium, the Computer History Museum, the British Computer Society, the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, the Worshipful Company of Stationers and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He currently serves as Past President of the Association for Computing Machinery, chairman of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) and completed a term as Chairman of the Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology for the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. President Obama appointed him to the National Science Board in 2012.
Cerf is a recipient of numerous awards and commendations in connection with his work on the Internet, including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, US National Medal of Technology, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the Prince of Asturias Award, the Tunisian National Medal of Science, the Japan Prize, the Charles Stark Draper award, the ACM Turing Award, Officer of the Legion d’Honneur and 29 honorary degrees. In December 1994, People magazine identified Cerf as one of that year’s “25 Most Intriguing People.” His personal interests include fine wine, gourmet cooking and science fiction. Cerf and his wife, Sigrid, were married in 1966 and have two sons, David and Bennett.
Bob Metcalfe
speaker
Bob Metcalfe, Internet pioneer, Ethernet inventor, and 3Com founder, received the 2024 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering. In 2023, Bob received the $1M Turing Award. Bob thinks Nobel prizes are like the Turing Award only not in Computer Science (;->).
Bob is a computational engineering affiliate of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). Bob is an Emeritus Life Trustee of MIT, his alma mater. For 11 years Bob was Professor of Innovation at the Cockrell School of Engineering, Professor of Entrepreneurship at the McCombs School of Business, and the Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise at The University of Texas at Austin. Bob retired from UTAustin in 2021, continuing as Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).
Bob was an Internet pioneer beginning in 1970 at MIT, Harvard, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Parc), Stanford, and 3Com. He led invention of Ethernet at Parc on May 22, 1973. Ethernet is the Internet’s standard plumbing, annually adding ports in the billions, especially if we let Bob count Wireless Ethernet, now known as Wi-Fi.
Among other honors, Bob has won the Bell, Hopper, Japan C&C, Marconi, McCluskey, Shannon, and Stibitz Prizes. He’s been inducted into the Internet, Consumer Electronics, and Computer History Museum Halls of Fame. Bob is Associate Computational Engineer with the Wolfram Institute.
Bob received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Medal of Honor in 1996 and National Medal of Technology in 2005, for leadership in invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet. Bob founded Internet startup 3Com Corporation in Silicon Valley in 1979. 3Com IPOed in 1984. Bob retired from 3Com in 1990. In 1999, 3Com revenue hit $5.7B. Its market cap peaked briefly at an inflation-adjusted $73 billion, of which Bob didn’t even get half. 3Com was acquired by HP in 2010. During the 1990s, Bob was CEO/Publisher/Pundit at IDG/InfoWorld Magazine. His Internet column, FROM THE ETHER, was syndicated among IDG’s 90 countries and read weekly by a ~million IT professionals. Bob was famously wrong in predicting an Internet “gigalapse” in 1996. Read all about it in Bob’s book, INTERNET COLLAPSES. Bob is a four-time academy award winner (;>), from the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Inventors, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science, and Technology (TAMEST). During 2000s, Bob was a limited, venture, general, and now emeritus Polaris Partner in Boston.
Christophe Diot
organizer
Christophe Diot received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from INP Grenoble in 1991. Diot pioneered diffserv, single source multicast, epidemic communication, peer-to-peer online games, and most importantly Internet measurements. After INRIA (years 93-98 in Sophia Antipolis), Diot spent his career in industry, building R&D labs at Sprint (Bay area), INTEL Research (Cambridge), and Technicolor (Paris and Palo Alto). He was the Chief Scientist at Technicolor between 2009 and 2015. He helped launch Safran Analytics as their CTO before joining GOOGLE in june 2018 as Principal Engineer in the Network Architecture team. At GOOGLE, Diot deals with telemetry at scale in the cloud infrastructure. Since January 2020, Diot is the Technical Lead of the Network Analytics team in the Google Global Networks organization. Diot has around 40 patents and more than 300 publications in major conferences and journals. He is an ACM fellow.