Vinton Cerf

He left IBM to attend graduate school at UCLA where he earned his M.S. degree in 1970 and his PhD in 1972. Cerf studied under Professor Gerald Estrin and worked in Professor Leonard Kleinrock's data packet networking group that connected the first two nodes of the ARPANet, the first node on the Internet, and "contributed to a host-to-host protocol" for the ARPANet.

While at UCLA, Cerf met Bob Kahn, who was working on the ARPANet system architecture. Cerf wrote the first TCP protocol with Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine, called Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program ( RFC 675), published in December 1974.

As vice president of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982 to 1986, Cerf led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet. In 1986, he joined Bob Kahn at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives as its vice president, working with Kahn on Digital Libraries, Knowledge Robots, and gigabit speed networks. Since 1988 Cerf lobbied for the privatization of the internet. In 1992, he and Kahn, among others, founded the Internet Society (ISOC) to provide leadership in education, policy and standards related to the Internet. Cerf served as the first president of ISOC. Cerf rejoined MCI during 1994 and served as Senior Vice President of Technology Strategy. In this role, he helped to guide corporate strategy development from a technical perspective. Previously, he served as MCI's senior vice president of Architecture and Technology, leading a team of architects and engineers to design advanced networking frameworks, including Internet-based solutions for delivering a combination of data, information, voice and video services for business and consumer use.

During 1997, Cerf joined the Board of Trustees of Gallaudet University, a university for the education of the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Cerf himself is hard of hearing. He has also served on the university's Board of Associates.

Cerf helped fund and establish ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. He joined the board in 1999, and served until November 2007. He was chairman from November 2000 to his departure from the Board.

On February 7, 2006, Cerf testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation's hearing on network neutrality. Speaking as Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, Cerf noted that nearly half of all consumers lacked meaningful choice in broadband providers and expressed concerns that without network neutrality government regulation, broadband providers would be able to use their dominance to limit options for consumers and charge companies like Google for their use of bandwidth.

During 2008, Cerf chaired the Internationalized domain name (IDNAbis) working group of the IETF. In 2008 Cerf was a major contender to be designated the first U.S. Chief Technology Officer by President Barack Obama. Cerf is the co-chair of Campus Party Silicon Valley, the US edition of one of the largest technology festivals in the world, along with Al Gore and Tim Berners-Lee. From 2009 to 2011, Cerf was an elected member of the Governing Board of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP). SGIP is a public-private consortium established by NIST in 2009 and provides a forum for businesses and other stakeholder groups to participate in coordinating and accelerating development of standards for the evolving Smart Grid. Cerf was elected to a two-year term as President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) beginning July 1, 2012. In 2015 Cerf co-founded (with Mei Lin Fung), and is currently chairman of, People-Centered Internet (PCI). On January 16, 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama announced his intent to appoint Cerf to the National Science Board. Cerf served until May 2018 when his six-year term expired.

Since 2010, Cerf has served as a Commissioner for the Broadband Commission for Digital Development, a UN body which aims to make broadband internet technologies more widely available.

From 2011 to 2016, Cerf was chairman of the board of trustees of ARIN, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) of IP addresses for United States, Canada, and part of the Caribbean. Until Fall 2015, Cerf chaired the board of directors of StopBadware, a non-profit anti-malware organization that started as a project at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Cerf is on the board of advisors to The Liquid Information Company Ltd of the UK, which works to make the web more usefully interactive and which has produced the Mac OS X utility called 'Liquid'. Vint Cerf is a member of the CuriosityStream Advisory Board.

Cerf was elected as the president of the Association for Computing Machinery in May 2012 and joined the Council on CyberSecurity's Board of Advisors in August 2013.

In June 2016, his work with NASA led to Delay-tolerant networking being installed on the International Space Station with an aim towards an Interplanetary Internet.

In March 2020, Cerf confirmed that he had tested positive for COVID-19. He announced the news via a tweet in which he also criticized President Donald Trump for the way he was handling the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. On April 3, 2020, Cerf announced via Twitter that VA Public Health had certified his wife and himself as no longer contagious with the virus.

It's Rosy - Happy 76th birthday, Vint Cerf! Widely known... | Facebook

Happy 76th birthday, Vint Cerf! Widely known as one of the "fathers of the internet," Cerf co-designed the TCP/IP protocols and is basically the reason why we're all using the internet today! We wish...