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
If you need to understand it to make policy, you should turn first to people who are scientists and engineers for factual information.
Geographically indexed databases are going to be extremely valuable over time for people who are in mobile operations.
I can imagine people actually working in virtual environments where productive, cooperative work is undertaken, and I think we will find people helping others to take advantage of masses of information that are inaccessible or too vast to process in real time today.
I believe that the problem of global climate change will ultimately spur our global society to respond and while the condition does not appear to be reversible, we will find ways to adapt to it.
I am an optimist by nature and believe strongly that technology can be brought to bear to create alternatives, even in crisis situations.
Although I've had several major career changes, I was extremely hesitant about making some of them.
Today we have 1 billion users on the Net. By 2010 we will have maybe 2 billion.
The Internet lives where anyone can access it.
In the larger companies, you have this tendency to get top-down direction.
Movie distribution may very well have migrated fully to digital form by then, making a huge dent in the need to print film and physically distribute content.
At Google, we see and feel the dangers of the government-led Net crackdown,
Engineers are really good at labeling and branding things. If we had named Kentucky Fried Chicken, it would have been Hot Dead Birds.
Privacy may actually be an anomaly,
Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.