Vinton Cerf, in full Vinton Gray Cerf, (born June 23, 1943, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.), American pc scientist who is taken into account one of many founders, together with Robert Kahn, of the Internet. In 2004 each Cerf and Kahn received the A.M. Turing Award, the very best honour in pc science, for his or her “pioneering work on internetworking, including the design and implementation of the Internet’s basic communications protocols, TCP/IP, and for inspired leadership in networking.”
In 1965 Cerf obtained a bachelor’s diploma in arithmetic from Stanford University in California. He then labored for IBM as a methods engineer earlier than attending the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), the place he earned a grasp’s diploma after which a doctorate in pc science in 1970 and 1972, respectively. He then returned to Stanford, the place he joined the college in pc science and electrical engineering.
While at UCLA, Cerf labored beneath fellow pupil Stephen Crocker within the laboratory of Leonard Kleinrock on the challenge to put in writing the communication protocol (Network Control Program [or Protocol]; NCP) for the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network; see DARPA), the primary pc community primarily based on packet switching, a heretofore untested expertise. (In distinction to strange phone communications, wherein a particular circuit have to be devoted to the transmission, packet switching splits a message into “packets” that journey independently over many various circuits.) UCLA was among the many 4 unique ARPANET nodes. Cerf additionally labored on the software program that measured and examined the efficiency of the ARPANET. While engaged on the protocol, Cerf met Kahn, {an electrical} engineer who was then a senior scientist at Bolt Beranek & Newman. Cerf’s skilled relationship with Kahn was among the many most essential of his profession.
In 1972 Kahn moved to DARPA as a program supervisor within the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), the place he started to envision a community of packet-switching networks—basically, what would grow to be the Internet. In 1973 Kahn approached Cerf, then a professor at Stanford, to help him in designing this new community. Cerf and Kahn quickly labored out a preliminary model of what they known as the ARPA Internet, the main points of which they revealed as a joint paper in 1974. Cerf joined Kahn at IPTO in 1976 to handle the workplace’s networking tasks. Together, with many contributing colleagues sponsored by DARPA, they produced TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), an digital transmission protocol that separated packet error checking (TCP) from points associated to domains and locations (IP).
Cerf’s work on making the Internet a publicly accessible medium continued after he left DARPA in 1982 to grow to be a vp at MCI Communications Corporation (WorldCom, Inc., from 1998 to 2003). While at MCI he led the hassle to develop and deploy MCI Mail, the primary industrial e-mail service that was linked to the Internet. In 1986 Cerf grew to become a vp on the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, a not-for-profit company positioned in Reston, Virginia, that Kahn, as president, had shaped to develop network-based data applied sciences for the general public good. Cerf additionally served as founding president of the Internet Society from 1992 to 1995. In 1994 Cerf returned to MCI as a senior vp, and from 2000 to 2007 he served as chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the group that oversees the Internet’s progress and enlargement. In 2005 he left MCI to grow to be vp and “chief Internet evangelist” on the search engine firm Google Inc.
In addition to his work on the Internet, Cerf served on many authorities panels associated to cybersecurity and the nationwide data infrastructure. A fan of science fiction, he was a technical marketing consultant to certainly one of creator Gene Roddenberry’s posthumous tv tasks, Earth: Final Conflict. Among his many honours had been the U.S. National Academy of Engineering’s Charles Stark Draper Prize (2001), the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research (2002), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2005), the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (2013), and the French Legion of Honour (2014).