Internet: Past, Present, and Future

Widely known as one of the "fathers of the Internet," Vint Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and architecture of the Internet. This talk, moderated by Sandeep Singhal, Hertz Fellow and Senior Director, AI Systems, at Meta, will offer insight into the trajectory of Vint's career, along with challenges and possibilities for the Internet in the future.

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This Hertz Foundation Innovation Hour will take place live on Tuesday, April 23, 2024, from 1:30–2:30 p.m. Eastern / 10:30–11:30 a.m. Pacific, using the Zoom video conference platform.

Registration for this event is closed.

Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. He has served in executive positions at ICANN, the Internet Society, MCI, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. A former Stanford Professor and former member of the US National Science Board, he is also the past President of the Association for Computing Machinery and serves in advisory capacities at NIST, DOE, NSF, NRO, and NASA.

He earned his B.S. in mathematics at Stanford and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science at UCLA. He is a member of both the US National Academies of Science and Engineering, the Worshipful Company of Information Technologies and the Worshipful Company of Stationers.

Cerf is a recipient of numerous awards for his work, including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, US National Medal of Technology, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the Prince of Asturias Award, the Japan Prize, the Charles Stark Draper award, the ACM Turing Award, the Marconi Prize and Marconi Lifetime Achievement Award, the IEEE Medal of Honor, the Legion d’Honneur, the VinFutures Grand Prize and the Franklin Medal. He is a Foreign Member of the British Royal Society and Swedish Academy of Engineering and holds 29 honorary degrees.

Sandeep Singhal is a 1992 Hertz Fellow and Senior Director, AI Systems, at Meta. He leads the shared infrastructure for supporting ML training, model processing, and model serving and formerly led Meta’s Storage group with responsibility for the company’s systems supporting all consumer products, data analytics and AI, and backup and disaster recovery.

Sandeep formerly led Google’s Storage (blob, block, file, Kubernetes and hybrid storage, transfer appliance, Redis/Memcache) through a massive growth wave, supporting both Cloud customers and products such as YouTube and Photos. Previously, he was GM of Bing Maps and Local Search at Microsoft, responsible for engineering, sales, support, and industry partnerships for consumer, enterprise, developer, and ULTRACAM hardware business lines. Previously, he led the Internet Explorer web platform group (IE11) and the Windows Networking group (accomplishments included Hyper-V Network Virtualization, DirectAccess, Branch Cache).

Sandeep serves on the External Advisory Board for the Johns Hopkins University Computer Science department and has previously served on advisory boards for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Research Council, and European Commission defining long-term research direction in cloud computing, networked entertainment, and small businesses. He chaired numerous standards bodies, including within the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Forum. Sandeep’s credits include 78 issued patents and dozens of publications, including three books.

He holds M.S. and Ph.D degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University, as well as B.S. degrees in Computer Science and in Mathematical Sciences and a B.A. in Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University.