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Vinton G. Cerf

Vinton G. Cerf

Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He contributes to global policy development and continued spread of the Internet. Widely known as one of the "Fathers of the Internet," Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. He has served in executive positions at MCI, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and on the faculty of Stanford University.

Vint Cerf served as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2000-2007 and has been a Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1998. Cerf served as founding president of the Internet Society (ISOC) from 1992-1995. Cerf is a Foreign Member of the British Royal Society and Swedish Academy of Engineering, and Fellow of 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 British Computer Society, the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, the Worshipful Company of Stationers and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He currently serves as Past President of the Association for Computing Machinery, chairman of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) and completed a term as Chairman of the Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology for the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. President Obama appointed him to the National Science Board in 2012.

Cerf is a recipient of numerous awards and commendations in connection with his work on the Internet, including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, US National Medal of Technology, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the Prince of Asturias Award, the Tunisian National Medal of Science, the Japan Prize, the Charles Stark Draper award, the ACM Turing Award, Officer of the Legion d’Honneur and 29 honorary degrees. In December 1994, People magazine identified Cerf as one of that year's "25 Most Intriguing People."

His personal interests include fine wine, gourmet cooking and science fiction. Cerf and his wife, Sigrid, were married in 1966 and have two sons, David and Bennett.

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    Ecological Auditory Measures for the Next Billion Users
    Brian Kemler
    Chet Gnegy
    Dick Lyon
    Dimitri Kanevsky
    John Hershey
    Malcolm Slaney
    Ricardo Antonio Garcia
    Sagar Savla
    Vint Cerf
    Ear and Hearing(2020)
    Preview abstract A range of new technologies have the potential to help people, whether traditionally considered hearing impaired or not. These technologies include more sophisticated personal sound amplification products, as well as real-time speech enhancement and speech recognition. They can improve user’s communication abilities, but these new approaches require new ways to describe their success and allow engineers to optimize their properties. Speech recognition systems are often optimized using the word-error rate, but when the results are presented in real time, user interface issues become a lot more important than conventional measures of auditory performance. For example, there is a tradeoff between minimizing recognition time (latency) by quickly displaying results versus disturbing the user’s cognitive flow by rewriting the results on the screen when the recognizer later needs to change its decisions. This article describes current, new, and future directions for helping billions of people with their hearing. These new technologies bring auditory assistance to new users, especially to those in areas of the world without access to professional medical expertise. In the short term, audio enhancement technologies in inexpensive mobile forms, devices that are quickly becoming necessary to navigate all aspects of our lives, can bring better audio signals to many people. Alternatively, current speech recognition technology may obviate the need for audio amplification or enhancement at all and could be useful for listeners with normal hearing or with hearing loss. With new and dramatically better technology based on deep neural networks, speech enhancement improves the signal to noise ratio, and audio classifiers can recognize sounds in the user’s environment. Both use deep neural networks to improve a user’s experiences. Longer term, auditory attention decoding is expected to allow our devices to understand where a user is directing their attention and thus allow our devices to respond better to their needs. In all these cases, the technologies turn the hearing assistance problem on its head, and thus require new ways to measure their performance. View details
    Loon SDN: Applicability to NASA's Next-Generation Space Communications Architecture
    Brian Barritt
    Vint Cerf
    2018 IEEE Aerospace Conference
    Preview abstract The Loon SDN is a large-scale implementation of a Temporospatial SDN and a cloud service for the interoperation and coordination of aerospace networks. The system schedules the physical wireless topology and the routing of packets across the terrestrial, air, and space segments of participating aerospace networks based on the propagated motion of their platforms and high-fidelity modeling of the relationships, constraints, and accessibility of wireless links between them. The Loon SDN is designed to optimize the operational control of aerospace networks; provide network operators with greater flexibility, situational awareness, and control; facilitate interoperability between networks; and to coordinate interference avoidance. This paper describes the Loon SDN and highlights its applicability to other directional, steerable, multi-hop aerospace networks such as non-geostationary satellite constellations and NASA's next-generation space communication architecture. View details
    ACM's 2016 general election
    Vinton G. Cerf
    Commun. ACM, 59(2016), pp. 10
    Preview
    IoT Safety and Security as Shared Responsibility
    Max Senges
    Patrick Ryan
    Rick Whitt
    Vint Cerf
    Journal of Business Informatics, 1. 2016(2016)
    Preview abstract As the things around us become more and more internetworked, users’ safety must be the first priority for all hardware and software providers. In the context of the Internet of Things, this paper puts forward a definition of “digital safety” as distinction from “online security” and discusses how multistakeholder governance can be applied to address safety challenges. View details
    The Fragmentation of the Internet
    Vinton G. Cerf
    IEEE Internet Computing, 20(2016), pp. 88-
    Preview
    Taking the Internet to the Next Physical Level
    Max Senges
    Roy Want
    Vint Cerf
    IEEE Computer Society(2016)
    Preview abstract We have come a long way since the IEEE Computer article by Mark Weiser in which he envisioned small connected computers that ubiquitously enhance all aspects of our life. In this opening article of the IEEE IoT Connection, we put forward our analysis of the architectural leitmotifs we should pursue for the Internet of Things ecosystem in order to repeat the staggering success of the Internet that resulted in the introduction of the World Wide Web. By success, we mean the economic value, social and technological innovation these platforms have brought to the world. View details
    On the road in Latin America
    Vinton G. Cerf
    Commun. ACM, 59(2016), pp. 7
    Preview
    An interview with U.S. chief technology officer Megan Smith
    Vinton G. Cerf
    Commun. ACM, 58(2015), pp. 39-43
    Preview
    Memory with a twist
    Vinton G. Cerf
    Commun. ACM, 58(2015), pp. 7
    Preview
    A Persistent Headache
    Vinton G. Cerf
    IEEE Internet Computing, 19(2015), pp. 80-
    Preview
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