Vinton G. Cerf
Dr. Vinton G. Cerf is senior vice president of Internet architecture and technology for WorldCom. Dr. Cerf's team of architects and engineers design advanced Internet frameworks for delivering a combination of data, information, voice, and video services for business and consumer use. Dr. Cerf is the co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet.

As vice president of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982-1986, he led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet. During his tenure from 1976-1982 with the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Dr. Cerf played a key role in the development of Internet and Internet-related data packet and security technologies. Prior to rejoining MCI in 1994, Dr. Cerf was vice president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI).

Dr. Cerf served as founding president of the Internet Society from 1992-1995 and in 1999 served as chairman of the board. He also served as founding chairman of the newly created Internet Societal Task Force that focuses on making the Internet accessible to everyone and analyzing international, national, and local policies surrounding Internet use. In addition, Dr. Cerf is honorary chairman of the newly formed IPv6 Forum, dedicated to raising awareness and speeding introduction of the new Internet protocol. Dr. Cerf has served as a member of the U.S. Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) since 1997. He currently serves as a principal for the Global Internet Project (GIP) and as a chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Vinton Cerf holds a bachelor of science in mathematics from Stanford University and has a master's and a doctorate, both in computer science, from the University of California, Los Angeles. He also holds honorary doctorates from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich; Lulea University of Technology, Sweden; University of the Balearic Islands, Palma; Capitol College, Maryland; Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania; George Mason University, Virginia; and Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain. Born in 1943 in Connecticut, Dr. Cerf and his wife, Sigrid, reside in Annandale, Va.


Robert E. Kahn
Dr. Robert Kahn is chairman, chief executive officer, and president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), which he founded in 1986 after a 13-year term at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). CNRI was created as a nonprofit organization to provide leadership and funding for research and development of the National Information Infrastructure.

Dr. Kahn worked on the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, N.J., and became an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He took a leave of absence from MIT to join Bolt Beranek and Newman, where he was responsible for the system design of the ARPANET, the first packet switching network.

In 1972 he moved to DARPA and subsequently became director of DARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). While there, he initiated the U.S. government's billion dollar Strategic Computing Program, the largest computer research and development program undertaken by the federal government. Dr. Kahn conceived the idea of open-architecture networking. He is co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols and was responsible for originating DARPA's Internet program. Dr. Kahn also coined the term National Information Infrastructure (NII) in the mid-1980s, which later became associated with the Internet and its core applications.

In his recent work, Dr. Kahn has been developing the concept of a digital object infrastructure as a middleware component of the NII. The notion is providing a framework for interoperability of heterogeneous information systems and is being used in several applications, such as the Defense Virtual Library and the Publisher's International DOI Foundation for Identification of Digital Objects. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the 1997 National Medal of Technology.

After receiving a bachelor of science in electrical engineering from City College of New York in 1960, Robert Kahn earned his master's and doctorate degrees from Princeton University in 1962 and 1964, respectively. Dr. Kahn was born in New York in 1938. He resides with his wife, Patrice, in McLean, Va.


Leonard Kleinrock
Dr. Leonard Kleinrock is known as an inventor of Internet technology, having created the basic principles of packet switching, the technology underpinning the Internet, while a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This was a decade before the birth of the Internet, which occurred when his host computer at the University of California, Los Angeles, became the first node of the Internet in September 1969. He wrote the first paper and published the first book on the subject; he also directed the transmission of the first message ever to pass over the Internet.

Dr. Kleinrock is chief executive officer, chairman, and founder of Nomadix, Incorporated, an Internet startup in the Los Angeles area. He is also chairman of TTI/Vanguard, a technology forum devoted to emerging technologies. He was a founder and the first president of Linkabit Corporation.

Dr. Kleinrock has published more than 225 papers and authored six books on a wide array of subjects, including packet switching networks, packet radio networks,  networks, broadband networks, and gigabit networks. Additionally, he has recently launched the field of nomadic computing, the emerging technology to support users as soon as they leave their desktop environments.

Leonard Kleinrock received his master's in electrical engineering in 1959, and his doctorate in electrical engineering in 1963, both from MIT, and has served as a professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles, since then. He received his bachelor of science in electrical engineering from City College of New York (CCNY) in 1957 (also an honorary doctorate of science from CCNY in 1997, and an honorary doctor of science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 2000). Dr. Kleinrock was born in New York City in 1934. He resides in Los Angeles, Calif., with his wife, Stella.


Lawrence G. Roberts
Dr. Lawrence G. Roberts led the team that designed and developed ARPANET, the world's first major computer packet network. Dr. Roberts, as Advanced Research Projects Agency's (ARPA's) chief scientist, began to architect ARPANET in 1966 influenced by the theoretical packet switching work by Dr. Leonard Kleinrock. This research network evolved into the modern Internet.

Dr. Roberts' ARPANET translated Dr. Kleinrock's innovating packet-switching theory into a practical, working network for the first time. Conventional opinion then held that packet switching could never work. Dr. Roberts' team, in conjunction with contractor BBN, which assembled and installed hardware, proved them wrong.

After ARPA, Dr. Roberts founded the world's first packet data communications carrier, Telenet-the company that developed and drove adoption of the popular X.25 data protocol. Dr. Roberts was chief executive officer from 1973 to 1980. Telenet was sold to GTE in 1979 and subsequently became the data division of Sprint. From 1983 to 1993, Dr. Roberts was chairman and chief executive officer of NetExpress, an electronics company specializing in packetized fax and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) equipment.

From 1993 to 1998, Dr. Roberts was president of ATM Systems, where he designed advanced ATM and Ethernet switches with QoS and Explicit Rate flow control. He proposed Explicit Rate to the ATM Forum in 1994 and spearheaded its development into ATM Forum recommendation TM 4.0 in 1996. He also led the development of a protocol for ATM over Ethernet called Cells in Frames.

Today, he serves Caspian Networks, an Internet infrastructure company, as CTO.

Lawrence Roberts has a bachelor of science, a master of science, and a doctorate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Born in 1937 in Connecticut, Dr. Roberts resides in Silicon Valley, Calif.