Kahn, Peterson 're-imagine the Internet,' Sept. 27

By Staff on Sept. 20, 2007, 10:02 a.m.

Robert Kahn, considered one of the fathers of the Internet, will join Larry Peterson, chair of Princeton's computer science department, in a public talk on the future of the Internet at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 27, in the Friend Center auditorium.

The talk, titled "Re-imagining the Internet," will be moderated by Jennifer Rexford, professor of computer science. It is sponsored by the School of Engineering and Applied Science in honor of Peterson's recent appointment as the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science.

Kahn, who earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton in 1964, started the government effort to create the Internet and is co-inventor of the TCP/IP communications protocols, the fundamental technology underpinning the Internet. In 1983, while at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Kahn initiated the billion-dollar Strategic Computing Program, the largest computer research and development program ever undertaken by the federal government.

Kahn is currently chairman and chief executive of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, which he founded in 1986 to promote the design and deployment of new technology in computing, high-speed networking, information management and nanotechnology. Kahn has received, among many honors, the National Medal of Technology, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Turing Award, which is widely considered the Nobel Prize of computing.

Peterson chairs the planning group of the Global Environment for Network Innovations, a recently launched National Science Foundation initiative with the mandate of making the Internet more trustworthy. Peterson also directs the PlanetLab Consortium, a global research network that supports the development of new generations of Internet services. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the author of a best-selling textbook on networking.

Rexford, who earned a 1991 B.S.E from Princeton, is a member of the planning group for the Global Environment for Network Innovations initiative.

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