IEEE Medal of Honor Goes to Vint Cerf

Met him once at a company meeting.   DARPA Connection.    Often mentioned here, writing linked to. 

IEEE Medal of Honor Goes to Vint Cerf,  He codesigned the Internet protocol and transmission control protocol    By JOANNA GOODRICH in IEEE

IEEE Life Fellow Vinton “Vint” Cerf, widely known as the “Father of the Internet,” is the recipient of the 2023 IEEE Medal of Honor. He is being recognized “for co-creating the Internet architecture and providing sustained leadership in its phenomenal growth in becoming society’s critical infrastructure.”

The IEEE Foundation sponsors the annual award.

While working as a program manager at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Processing Techniques Office in 1974, Cerf and IEEE Life Fellow Robert Kahn designed the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol. TCP manages data packets sent over the Internet, making sure they don’t get lost, are received in the proper order, and are reassembled at their destination correctly. IP manages the addressing and forwarding of data to and from its proper destinations. Together they make up the Internet’s core architecture and enable computers to connect and exchange traffic.

“Cerf’s tireless commitment to the Internet’s evolution, improvement, oversight, and evangelism throughout its history has made an indelible impact on the world,” said one of the endorsers of the award. “It is largely due to his efforts that we even have the Internet, which has changed the way society lives.

“The Internet has enabled a large part of the world to receive instant access to news, brought us closer to friends and loved ones, and made it easier to purchase products online,” the endorser said. “It’s improved access to education and scientific discourse, made smartphones useful, and opened the door for social media, cloud computing, video conferencing, and streaming. Cerf also saw early on the importance of decentralized control, with no one company or government completely in charge.”  ... ' 

Vint Cerf on the Internet

Vint Cerf comments on the direction of the Internet

Vint Cerf Helped Create the Internet on the Back of an Envelope. Now He's Calling for More Critical Thinking About How We Use It

The Wall Street Journal, Emily Bobrow, December 16, 2022

Google Chief Internet Evangelist and 2004 ACM A.M. Turing Award co-recipient Vint Cerf helped invent the Internet but acknowledges its downsides, including its use for spreading misinformation and disinformation. Cerf says addressing this "propagation problem" requires Google and similar companies to better "understand how these mechanisms influence the way people behave." He observes that although commercialization has broadened the Internet's scope, feedback algorithms appear to be directing people toward "more divisive and extreme stuff." Cerf urges more critical thinking to rein in the Internet's sociological and psychological effects, while businesses must make better efforts to contain online trolling, lying, bullying, and surveillance.

Full Article May Require Paid Registration  ... 

Vint Cerf Invents a Company

Good process thoughts on  digital, below only an excerpt, full at the link.

Digital Synergy,  By Vinton G. Cerf

Communications of the ACM, June 2022, Vol. 65 No. 6, Page 9  10.1145/3534934

Google Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Vinton G. Cerf 

Imagine for a moment a company I will call ACRONYM that maintains warehouses around the world from which customer orders for a variety of products are made. Imagine further that some of the inventory is in digital form (think movies, music, ebooks) in addition to being physical in nature. ACRONYM's access to information in digital form turns out to be enormously enabling. The data is readily processed by sophisticated algorithms. This column is pure speculation on my part but inventing the imaginary ACRONYM Company helped me imagine how powerful it can be to have data available that permits fact-based analysis of business performance, projections for future business operations, and understanding of the marketplace the business serves.

ACRONYM gets its orders online, so they are already in digital form, with information ACRONYM needs to fulfill the order. Customers provide all the information requested since, without it, ACRONYM can't or won't place the order. The fact that the data is already in machinable form means ACRONYM can (in no particular order or priority):

Track the geocentric demand for specific products, which will inform them of where to place inventory and in what quantity in its many warehouses to reduce delivery time;

Track seasonal variations in demand to create powerful forecasting tools so that long-lead items can be ordered for inventory in a timely way;

Associate demographics with product orders to further analyze and anticipate demand and inform potential advertising campaigns;

Use reinforcement and other machine learning tools to prioritize stock keeping levels in warehouses; ..... ' 

Heterogeneous Computing

  More by Vint Cerf, previously discussed,  cant we get computers to better work together?  Communicate better.  The ultimate idea of AI is one way. communicating for our needs.

On Heterogeneous Computing

By Vinton G. Cerf   in CACM

Communications of the ACM, December 2021, Vol. 64 No. 12, Page 9   10.1145/3492896

Google Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Vinton G. Cerf 

One of the major challenges in the development of the Arpanet was solving the problem of communication between heterogeneous computers. In the late 1960s and 1970s, there were several computer makers and their machines had varying word lengths, binary coding schemes, instruction sets and a plethora of operating systems. The underlying homogeneous network of Interface Message Processors (IMPs), which we would call "routers" or "packet switches" today, offered a uniform interface to the heterogeneous "host" computers connected to the Arpanet. The Network Working Group, led by Stephen D. Crocker, solved the problem by the invention of the Network Control Protocol (NCP) and application protocols such as File Transfer and TELNET (remote terminal access). Coping with heterogeneity is a challenge. The Internet designers tackled the problem of interconnecting heterogeneous packet-switching networks using the TCP/IP Protocol Suite.

In the computing world, the Reduced Instruction Set Computing architecture (RISC) has provided widely adopted instruction set design principles for which David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy received the prestigious 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award. Although I am not a hardware designer, I have been struck by the observations of others such as Margaret Martonosi, Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation for Computer, Information Systems and Engineering and Google colleague, Robert Iannucci, that heterogeneity is returning to computer design with concomitant challenges for compiler designers. In addition to RISC-based CPUs, we now see Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), Tensor Flow Processing Units (TPUs), Quantum Processing Units (QPUs), and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in use or looming on the horizon. Each of these has unique properties that allow for optimal programming solutions to hard (and even NP-hard) problems.

The idea of using a mix of computing capability is by no means new. In the 1950s and early 1960s, my thesis advisor, Gerald Estrin, and his colleagues worked on what they called "Fixed Plus Variable Computing."a I have written about this before.b This time I want to focus on the challenge for compiler writers to map conventional and new programming languages into functional operation on a variety of programming platforms, bearing in mind their various results and potential parallelism must be accounted for by the compiler. Martonosi points out that testing and analysis must be applied to increase confidence that the physical devices work as intended and that the mapping of a program onto the hardware mix produces the intended computational result. Anyone familiar with the problem of numerical analysis will appreciate that details count. For example, loss of precision in large-scale floating-point computations can deliver erroneous results if inadequate attention is paid to the details of the actual computation.  .....   ' 

Vint Cerf Examines Googles Misinformation

Short intro and link forward below. 

Via ACM NEWS

How Internet Pioneer Vint Cerf Illuminated Google's Misinformation Mess

By Fast Company,September 27, 2021

In June 2020, the Parliament of the U.K. published a policy report with numerous recommendations aimed at helping the government fight against the "pandemic of misinformation" powered by internet technology. The report is rather forceful on the conclusions it reaches: "Platforms like Facebook and Google seek to hide behind 'black box' algorithms which choose what content users are shown. They take the position that their decisions are not responsible for harms that may result from online activity. This is plain wrong."  ... .

Google chief Internet evangelist Vint Cerf testified that Google's evaluation of Websites includes "a manual process to establish criteria and a good-quality training set, and then a machine-learning system to scale up to the size of the World Wide Web, which we index. ... 

Full article. in FastCompany

Vint Cerf Talks Repairability

Below an intro, some good points.  

Repairability Redux  By Vinton G. Cerf

Communications of the ACM, December 2020, Vol. 63 No. 12, Page 5   10.1145/3429267

Google Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Vinton G. Cerf 

I wrote about repairability in the February 2020 issue of Communications (p. 7) and here I am at year's end harping on the same topic. My excuse is COVID-19. I have been at home for the past six months while my normal schedule would have had me on the road three weeks out of four. Of course, like many of you, I have been all over the world—virtually—since mid-March. There are days when I can visit Australia and Austria and be home in time for dinner. So, what does that have to do with stuff that breaks? Mostly, I am actually here when it does. Under more normal conditions, my wife would have to call a repair person to fix or replace a broken item. Now that I am home, I am sometimes the one who discovers the problem, or I am told about it before a repair service gets the call. I am an engineer of sorts, so broken things attract my attention. Engineers love problems to solve. "Fix me! Fix me! You can do it!" Of course, if you are like me, you go to the hardware store three times: first to get the stuff you need, second to get the stuff you forgot, and third to get the stuff you need to fix what you broke. My basic rant is that manufactured goods today do not seem to take into account the possibility of repair.   ... " 

Internet of Medical Things

From the ACM, Vint Cerf talks about the current and near future state of digital medicine.

On the Internet of Medical Things
By Vinton G. Cerf
Communications of the ACM, August 2020, Vol. 63 No. 8, Page 5  10.1145/3406779

Google Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Vinton G. Cerf

In my last column (June 2020), I wrote about my experience with COVID-19 and the challenges involved with getting medical attention. The problem is still with us, even with the improved availability of personal protection equipment and masks. The experience of calling for a doctor's appointment and being told I could not come into the doctor's office was unsettling to say the least. A "video consultation" was all that was offered. My reaction was "Wait, you won't be getting any vital signs or other medical information that way!" This led to the natural conclusion that remote detection would be helpful in these conditions. Telemedicine has long been of interest, especially for treating patients in rural or isolated areas where physicians and hospitals may be in short supply or absent entirely. Wearable sensors have become popular items for people who want to track their daily exercise or challenge themselves to exceed past performance with new records. ... "

On Multisensory Adventures

Vint Cerf on a favorite topic.   The senses.  He points to two inspirational books on the topic.  We are starting to 'understand' senses, at least if we use as a measure how we are able to mimic them.

Multisensory Adventures
By Vinton G. Cerf
Communications of the ACM, April 2020, Vol. 63 No. 4, Page 7
10.1145/3383671

Google Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Vinton G. Cerf 
In this column, I want to draw your attention to two books. One has been published to great acclaim and the other is still in process. They resonate with a visceral intensity for which I was honestly unprepared and surprised. The first, Multisensory Experiences, Where the Senses Meet Technology, by Carlos Velasco and Marianna Obrist, is to be published by Oxford University Press. The authors explore concepts we experience every day but don't necessarily understand fully. We are familiar with the five senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell). Our brains transduce these physical phenomena into neural pulses that flood along many pathways and interact in many ways. Interestingly, all these senses are translated into essentially similar neural signals but they are processed in a complex and interconnected neural web producing what we call experience.  .... "

Vint Cerf Takes a Driverless Ride

Vint Cerf takes a hands-free, unaccompanied drive in a Waymo and muses the technology.

A Hands-Free Ride   By Vinton G. Cerf
Communications of the ACM, December 2019, Vol. 62 No. 12, Page   10.1145/3369587

Google Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Vinton G. Cerf 

I recently had the opportunity to take a ride in a Waymo self-driving car in Chandler, AZ. I had been looking forward to this experience, not only to see how well the technology worked but also what the experience might be like as a passenger. Upon my arrival at the Waymo facility, I had apparently approached the side of the building where the Waymo cars go at the end of their duty cycles to be refueled and inspected. As I drove in, I was more or less surrounded by incoming Waymo vehicles. I relaxed as they navigated their way around me.  ... " 

Vint Cerf on the 50th Anniversary of the Internet

Love the History of Science, here Vint Cerf, architect of the Internet, does a good job here of giving some important points its history.  Proud to have been there for the entire time.

Vint Cerf’s top moments from 50 years of the Internet  in The Google Blog .... Google VP and Chief Internet Evangelist

Editor’s note: On the 50th anniversary of the Internet, this post comes from one of the most knowledgeable sources out there. Though it’s not included in his official title, Vint Cerf is, in fact, one of the architects of the modern Internet. 

Before there was the Internet, there was a packet. The “sending of the packet” was actually the first step toward the invention of the Internet as we know it, and it happened 50 years ago today. On that day, we established the first connection between two computers—from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute—on the ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet. 

Connecting the planet in this way remains one of the most astounding technical and societal achievements of our lifetime. A lot has happened in the years since, and the rise of the Internet has come with its own set of challenges that will require new solutions. But over the years there have been many bright spots, including 17 moments that, for me, stand out the most. 

1. October 29, 1969: The first packet was sent. This pioneered our understanding of operational packet switching technology, which prepared us for the subsequent development of the Internet. 

2. 1971: Networked electronic mail was created using file transfers as a mechanism to distribute messages to users on the Arpanet.

3. 1974: The design of the Internet was released. Robert Kahn and I published “A protocol for packet network intercommunication.” In this paper we presented not only a protocol, but an architecture and philosophy that supported an open design for the sharing of resources that existed on different packet-switching networks. 

4. November 22, 1977: A major demonstration of the Internet took place, linking three networks: Packet Radio, Packet Satellite and ARPANET. 

5. January 1, 1983: The Internet was operationally born, and I’ve used an “electronic postcard” analogy to explain how it works.

6. 1983: The operational mobile phone arrived, which is crucial because, although the Internet and mobile phones were developed in parallel, they eventually proved to be complementary technologies. ... "

  (Read the rest at the link!)

Machine Learning Astonishes

Free at the link, a short non-technical article in the latest Communications of the ACM, which describes how machine learning is taking over computing.  And how making machines learn has led to a new enthusiasm of devices, which are continually updating and discovering.   Its astonishing!

Polyglot!  By Vinton G. Cerf 

Communications of the ACM, September 2019, Vol. 62 No. 9, Page 6
10.1145/3352690     Google Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Vinton G. Cerf 

Google speaks 106 languages—or at least can understand queries in written form if not also oral form. When I watch someone interacting verbally with Google Assistant in languages other than English (my native tongue), I realize Google's language ability vastly exceeds my own. I have a modest ability to speak and understand German. I know a few phrases in Russian and French. But it suddenly strikes me that Google is usefully dealing with over 100 languages in written and oral form. Assistant is responding to queries by recognizing speech input, searching the Web, and voicing the answers in multiple languages. Google Lens is translating text seen in photos into the viewer's preferred language. Google Translate is converting text and speech in one language into another with increasing quality. The quality varies, of course, depending on the volume of training material available to configure deep neural machine learning networks, but the fact that it works at all across so many languages is nothing short of astonishing and even daunting. .... "

Vint Cerf on the NSF

A technical view of the value of the NSF since the 60s.  Was honored to see much of the progress first hand.

In Debt to the NSF    By Vinton G. Cerf 

Communications of the ACM, April 2019, Vol. 62 No. 4, Page 5  10.1145/3313989

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched the ARPANET project in 1968 and the Internet project in 1973.

In 1980, the National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored the development of CSNETa to connect a number of computer science departments together that had not already been connected to the ARPANET. Using a mix of dial-up phone connections, public X.25 packet network services, and access to the ARPANET, the CSNET was the programmatic forerunner of the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET).  .... "

Caution About Nets

Wildly successful in narrow domains recently, where will it take us?  The notion of the brittleness of solutions is brought up.   Brittleness links to need for retesting and maintenance.  Which was our own experience. 

On Neural Nets   By Vinton G. Cerf 

I am only a layman in the neural network space so the ideas and opinions in this column are sure to be refined by comments from more knowledgeable readers. The recent successes of multilayer neural networks have made headlines.  .... 

Communications of the ACM, July 2018, Vol. 61 No. 7, Page 7
10.1145/3224195

A short piece with cautions about the dependency on neural net architectures ...   

On Unintended Circumstances

There are always unintended consequences,   but what are their risks?  Always suggest a risk analysis to understand precise nature and magnitude over time.

 Unintended Consequences   By Vinton G. Cerf

Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. He served as ACM president from 2012–2014.  Was an an inventor of the Internet.

Communications of the ACM, Vol. 61 No. 3, Page 7

When the internet was being developed, scientists and engineers in academic and research settings drove the process. In their world, information was a medium of exchange. Rather than buying information from each other, they exchanged it. Patents were not the first choice for making progress; rather, open sharing of designs and protocols were preferred. Of course, there were instances where hardware and even software received patent and licensing treatment, but the overwhelming trend was to keep protocols and standards open and free of licensing constraints. The information-sharing ethic contributed to the belief that driving down barriers to information and resource sharing was an important objective. Indeed, the Internet as we know it today has driven the barrier to the generation and sharing of information to nearly zero. Smartphones, laptops, tablets, Web cams, sensors, and other devices share text, imagery, video, and other data with a tap of a finger or through autonomous operation. Blogs, tweets, social media, and Web page updates, email and a host of other communication mechanisms course through the global Internet in torrents (no pun intended). Much, if not most, of the information found on the Internet seems to me to be beneficial; a harvest of human knowledge. But there are other consequences of the reduced threshold for access to the Internet. ... "

Interview with Vint Cerf

Non technical view of the history and future of the Internet.  I should note that this piece contradicts another piece quoting him regarding AI I recently posted.  You have to always be wary of the context of these pieces. He is not an alarmist on the use of AI.

CW@50: Vint Cerf on his 'love affair' with tech and what’s coming next
The father of the internet looks back at the last 50 years and ahead to what faces IT
               
Sharon Gaudin By Sharon Gaudin ... " 

Vint Cerf Criticizes AI

In Nextgov:   Some of the cautions mentioned are noted.

" ... Vint Cerf is often called the “father of the internet” and he frequently speaks about technology to large groups of people as Google’s chief internet evangelist.

He isn’t a big fan of artificial intelligence though. At least not yet.

“AI stands for artificial idiot,” he said Tuesday, speaking before a largely federal audience at AFCEA’s Internet of Things Tech Summit in Washington, D.C. .....  " 

Vint Cerf on the Internet of Things

In the CACM:   Cites existence of chaotic protocols rather than standards.

" ... A number of significant challenges face the continuing development of the Internet of Things (IoT), according to Google chief Internet evangelist and former ACM president Vint Cerf. ... 

Speaking at the Seventh Cyber Security Lecture at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering labeled "The Coming Age of the Internet of Things," Cerf observed that a lack of standards could hinder the expansion and/or operation of the Internet of Things, which will come to include smart homes, smart cities, and the smart grid. ..  "

Warning of a Digital Dark Age

Despite methods like the Internet Archive, in the BBC:

" ... Vint Cerf, a "father of the internet", says he is worried that all the images and documents we have been saving on computers will eventually be lost. Currently a Google vice-president, he believes this could occur as hardware and software become obsolete.

He fears that future generations will have little or no record of the 21st Century as we enter what he describes as a "digital Dark Age".. ... "

Vint Cerf on the Internet

Always interesting Internet pioneer, Vint Cerf, who we used as a consultant in the enterprise, talks about the current state and future of the Intenet.  In the Washington Post.

Where is the Internet Going?

In the NYT:  So where is all this going?  Thoughtful piece including an interview with Vinton Cerf,  now with Google and DARPA, Internet Pioneer.  We worked with him a number of years ago.   I am sure he too would have not guessed its direction during its rise, only thirty years ago.