About the Speaker

Vinton G. Cerf is VP and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. Cerf served at MCI, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, at DARPA and as a member of the Stanford University Faculty.

Cerf co-invented the architecture and basic protocols of the Internet.   He has received the U.S. National Medal of Technology, ACM Turing award, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Japan Prize.

Vint Cerf served as chairman of the board of ICANN and as founding president of the Internet Society.   He is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Engineering Consortium, the Computer History Museum, the National Academy of Engineering and a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Cerf holds a BS degree from Stanford University and MS and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA.  He has received twenty honorary degrees.

Turing's Legacy in the Networked World

Alan Turing leaves a legacy of passionate, analytic curiosity, and a vital engagement with abstraction as a tool for problem statement and solution. The Internet (and related communication technologies) highlights the value of standards, abstraction, stable interfaces and conventions. His interest in complexity and computability illuminate questions that arise daily in distributed, networked environments. What computations can we rely on in the presence of information of variable provenance? Is convergence assured despite the dynamics of network state? What kinds of algorithms can be relied on to operated in a distributed, parallel fashion? There may be more questions than answers, but this is precisely the condition that spurs new research.