I was lucky enough to catch a lecture by Vinton Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, yesterday at RIT. He was a very energetic speaker and I enjoyed his talk very much. Below are some of the highlights:
- “IP version 4 only has a 32 bit address space and that is my fault.”
- Dr. Cerf wants our mobile phones to be viewed as controllers to all devices around us that will eventually be on the internet (home stereo, lights, projectors, etc.)
- Dr. Cerf uses Arch Rock products in his home to monitor temperature and humidity in every room of his house.
- There are multiple cloud vendors/networks available today however they are all different and have different interfaces. He views this the same as how in the days of the ArpaNet when networks were different and he helped to create TCP/IP and gateways and therefore believes it is an excellent area for research today.
- Bit Rot was stated to be another huge problem that we will face in future years and generations
I was also lucky enough to be able to ask a question to Dr. Cerf directly in the Q&A part of the lecture. My question was how to innovate and create a common interface between the cloud platforms when the internet has become so commercialized as opposed to back when Dr. Cerf worked on the ArpaNet and it was basically a military experiment. His response was that in academia the comercial and political boundaries are not always present and leveraging organic growth and the open source community support is the best way to accomplish the task.
If Dr. Cerf comes to a institution near your area, I highly suggest hearing him speak.
April 5th, 2009 at 7:38 am
Very cool. I’m jealous.