Vinton Cerf
Vinton Cerf
Vinton Gray Cerf ForMemRS,is an American Internet pioneer, who is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-inventor Bob Kahn and packet switching inventors Paul Baran and Donald Davies, among others. His contributions have been acknowledged and lauded, repeatedly, with honorary degrees and awards that include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Marconi Prize and membership in the National Academy of Engineering...
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth23 June 1943
CityNew Haven, CT
People need to be exposed to what the various problems are in various parts of the business. And you can become isolated from that in a large company.
If you need to understand it to make policy, you should turn first to people who are scientists and engineers for factual information.
Of course, you do have to get accustomed to being satisfied a little bit at second-hand by people who actually do some of the key work.
My belief is that there will be very large numbers of Internet-enabled devices on the Net - home appliances, office equipment, things in the car and maybe things that you carry around. And since they're all on the Internet and Internet-enabled, they'll be manageable through the network, and so we'll see people using the Net and applications on the Net to manage their entertainment systems, manage their, you know, office activities and maybe even much of their social lives using systems on the Net that are helping them perform that function.
Allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success.
Geographically indexed databases are going to be extremely valuable over time for people who are in mobile operations.
These people just don't know you can't do that. So they just go out and do it. That's the great thing of working with all these new folks.
I'm disappointed in people in general.
I would agree that the U.S. educational system, especially at the undergraduate and graduate levels, needs some work, but in the meantime, we seem to be cranking out people who are capable,
There are things that have excited me to no end, and it's the sharing of knowledge that has come about on the network, and I see at an increasing pace this ability to share what we know.
I'm still a strong proponent of getting IPv6 rolled out,
The Internet reflects the societies in which we live, and so the content on the Net and some of the abuses that you see on the Net are reflections of that.
Of course, I've done small company things, too, but most of them have been nonprofit organizations, such as the Internet Society, and I'm on the board of a number of small companies.
I started thinking about the past 25 years as the Internet evolved, and I thought, 'Gee, what should we be doing now so that in another 25 years, we are ready for whatever's coming?'