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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Atlanta, GA | Posted: April 3, 2015
Tara La Bouff
Communications Manager
tlabouff@cc.gatech.edu
Summary Sentence:
The man widely lauded as the ‘Father of the Internet’ – Vint Cerf – made a special visit to Georgia Tech’s College of Computing this week to speak to students and faculty and listen to undergraduate poster presentations.
Full Summary:
The man widely lauded as the “Father of the Internet” – Vint Cerf – made a special visit to Georgia Tech’s College of Computing this week to speak to students and faculty and listen to undergraduate poster presentations.
Vint Cerf HeadshotThe man widely lauded as the “Father of the Internet” – Vint Cerf – made a special visit to Georgia Tech’s College of Computing this week to speak to students and faculty and listen to undergraduate poster presentations.
Cerf -- who is vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, and vice chair of the Marconi Society -- delivered the keynote address, "Dynamics, Evolution and Explosion of the Internet (to Billions of Devices)," on March 31 in the Klaus Atrium. He discussed what he foresees as a looming Digital Dark Age, when future generations may not be able to access our work because of device limitations (who still has an eight-inch floppy disk?). He also discussed how we connect billions of devices and a growing proliferation of sensors -- from automobiles to security to “smart” wine corks.
He addressed how the proliferation of technology in traditional objects creates new vulnerabilities.
"Most of the reasons we have these vulnerabilities is that our software stinks,” he said. “We haven't improved our ability to write software. We should pay attention to reinforcing our security within the software as well as the security of the hardware.”
“I would like to see that everyone takes a required course in programming before leaving high school. It prepares you to know how hard it is to write code, how hard it is to find bugs, and to be prepared that it may not work as advertised,” said Cerf, winner of the 2004 Turing Award, among other distinctions.
As a graduate student at UCLA, Cerf contributed to the development of host-to-host protocol as part of a group that connected the first two nodes of ARPAnet, the Internet’s predecessor. He continued to research packet network protocols and co-designed the TCP/IP protocol suite for the Department of Defense. Over the next 10 years, he further developed what would become the Internet and led the engineering of the first commercial email service connected to the Internet. Today, the Internet has 1.8 billion hosts and 2.9 billion users.
“The significance of Vint Cerf’s visit to Georgia Tech cannot be overstated,” said Dean Zvi Galil. “His contributions to computer science have dramatically changed nearly every aspect of our daily lives – from how we monitor the world around us, transmit and store data, stay close to the ones we love or turn strangers into new communities of support. It was an honor to have him here.”
Following the lecture, Cerf presented awards to undergraduate students for the quality of their poster presentations. He participated in a panel discussion about challenges for women in technology along with Aakanksha Chowdhery, postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond; Dana Randall, director of the Algorithms and Randomness Center and ADVANCE Professor of Computing, and Ellen Zegura, professor of computer science, with moderator Hatti Hamlin, executive director of the Marconi Society.
