In a conference held Monday in Mountain View, California, Google chief evangelist and “father of the internet” Vint Cerf pleaded with attendees to not scramble to invest in conversational AI just because it’s hot right now. He added that “there’s an ethical issue here” he hopes people working on such technology will consider, according to a CNBC report. But who exactly is Vint Cerf, why’s he called the “father of the internet,” and what does he do now? This article aims to explain just that. Who is Vinton Cerf? Vinton Gray Cerf, was born on June 23, 1943, in New Haven, Connecticut, US. He is a computer scientist best known for co-designing the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the internet, which are the fundamental communication protocols that allow computers to communicate with each other across a network. He’s considered to be one of the founders, along with Robert Kahn, of the Internet. His works won him the A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science. What are Vint Cerf’s educational qualifications? In 1965, Cerf received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Stanford University in California. He then worked for IBM as a systems engineer before attending the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where he graduated with a master’s degree in 1970 and then a doctorate in computer science in 1972. While at UCLA, Cerf worked under fellow student Stephen Crocker in the laboratory of Professor Leonard Kleinrock on the project to write the communication protocol for the ARPANET. The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network was the first wide-area network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. It laid the foundation stones of the internet as we know it. Cerf also worked on the software that measured and tested the performance of the ARPANET. While working on the protocol, Cerf met Kahn, an electrical engineer who was then a senior scientist at Bolt Beranek & Newman. What did Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn work on? In 1972 Kahn moved to Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a program manager in the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), where he began to envision a network of packet-switching networks—essentially, what would become the Internet. In 1973 Kahn approached Cerf, then a professor at Stanford, to assist him in designing this new network. Cerf and Kahn soon worked out a preliminary version of what they called the ARPA Internet, the details of which they published as a joint paper in 1974. Cerf joined Kahn at IPTO in 1976 to manage the office’s networking projects. Together, with many contributing colleagues sponsored by DARPA, they produced TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), an electronic transmission protocol that separated packet error checking (TCP) from issues related to domains and destinations (IP). In 1972, Robert Kahn joined DARPA as a program manager in the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). It was there that he began envisioning a radical new concept – a network of packet-switching networks that would later evolve into the internet. In 1973, Kahn approached Cerf, who was then a professor at Stanford, to join him in designing this network. Together, they worked on an early version of what they called the ARPA Internet. In 1976, Cerf came aboard to manage IPTO's networking projects. With the help of several colleagues backed by DARPA, they developed TCP What are Vint Cerf’s other works? Cerf continued working on making the internet publicly accessible even after he quit DARPA in 1982 when he became a vice president at MCI Communications Corporation. There, he led the effort to develop and deploy MCI Mail, the first commercial email service. Cerf also served as the founding president of the Internet Society from 1992 to 1995. In 1994, Cerf returned to MCI as a senior vice president. 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 growth and expansion. Where is Vint Cerf now? In 2005, he left MCI to become vice president and “chief Internet evangelist” at the search engine company Google Inc. “He contributes to global policy development and continued spread of the Internet,” reads his About page on the company website.
