12 November 2014
Dr Vint Cerf explores our online future
The future of the Internet, according to one of its founding fathers,Dr Vint Cerf, is full of positive possibilities, including a launch into space that will see it form the backbone of communications across the solar system.
Dr Cerf, Vice President, Chief Internet Evangelist for Google and one of the world’s most savvy Internet futurists, will be presenting a free public lecture at the University of South Australia on Friday November 14, exploring the Internet - its past, its present, including current challenges, and its future.
Instrumental in the founding and formation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that is responsible for assuring the reliable and stable management of the unique identifiers of the Internet (IP addresses, Domain Names and protocol parameters). Dr Cerf was also a prime mover in the development of the first commercial email system connected to the Internet.
While in South Australia, the University will be honouring his enormous contribution to global communications, science and Internet innovation by awarding him an Honorary Doctorate that will be presented at the completion of his lecture.
Dr Cerf believes two key challenges for the Internet are like the different faces of the same coin.
“We must strive to ensure the Internet continues to grow and thrive and that it remains a vehicle for open innovation so that the next great ideas – the Skypes and the Googles of the future – are possible and will be supported by an open, highly creative environment,” he says.
“At the same time we need to work to make the Internet safer by developing the technical means and adopting the legal practices that will maintain that. With a safe, more trustworthy Internet we can encourage the social, economic, governmental and academic connectedness that has marked the Internet as a watershed for the development of global productivity.”
Dr Cerf says the framework that cloud computing offers is just the beginning of an endless online environment of collaboration.
“The Internet really has made it possible to see a future where we understand ourselves to be part of a planet of communicating devices and people rather than a planet of nations,” he says.
“Our next challenge is to build an Internet that can operate across the solar system. Prototype software is already on the space station, Mars and the Epoxi spacecraft and we hope to build that network one space mission at a time.”
Registrations to attend this free public lecture can me made online.
Media contact: Michèle Nardelli office: +61 8 8302 0966 mobile: 0418 823 673 email: Michele.nardelli@unisa.edu.au
