Laudatio del Prof. Luciano Lenzini

Rector, members of the Senate, ladies and gentlemen,

It's a great pleasure and an honour for me to give this laudation for Dr. Cerf and Dr. Kahn.It is a pleasure since this ceremony has given me the opportunity to meet them again aftermany years. It is an honour because my University, confirming its long scientific traditionand its focus on everything that is innovative, is about to confer the Laurea Honoris Causaon two scientists who are internationally recognized as being outstanding.

To understand the meaning and depth of their work we need to go back to the late sixtiesand early seventies. In that period the first packet switching network, called the AdvancedResearch Projects Agency Network or ARPANET for short was put into operation and Dr.Kahn had a major role in the overall architectural design. The aim of ARPANET was toconnect computers or hosts in order to timeshare resources. ARPANET used the innovativeconcept of "packet switching", an alternative to the traditional "circuit switching" techniqueimplemented by telephone networks.

In October 1972, Dr. Kahn organized a large, very successful demonstration of the ARPANETcapabilities at the International Computer Communication Conference. This eventwas the origin of several national and international research projects. For example, in Pisa wehad RPCNET, the first Italian packet switching network in a research environment. At thesame time, telecommunication operators started looking with great interest at the potentialof this technology to provide data services to their customers.

In the seventies, ARPA developed two other packet network technologies, one for groundbased packet radio (called PRNET) and the other for broadcast geostationary satellites (namedSATNET). Neither of these packet networks could communicate through ARPANET.Then, Dr. Kahn's idea was to get hosts to communicate across multiple packet networks ofrather arbitrary design without knowing the network technology underneath. This idea pavedthe way to the Internet era.

In the spring of 1973, Bob Kahn (then at ARPA) and Vint Cerf (then at Stanford) startedworking together on the detailed design of this idea. The outcomes of their fruitful collaborationwere many and strongly innovative. They realised that a "gateway" (now known as arouter) was needed between networks to accommodate their different interfaces and routepackets of data. In addition, their collaboration led to the creation of a new protocol, calledthe Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, which as we all know is still used today, aftermore than 35 years from its original design, to carry out communication between processesrunning on separate hosts connected to the same or different networks.

In order to support packetized voice, in 1978, Vint Cerf split the TCP into two separate parts.The result was TCP and the Internet Protocol and this justifies the acronym TCP/IP. TheUser Datagram Protocol (UDP) was thus created and many services, including the modernvoice over IP service (VoIP), work today on top of UDP.

The widespread success of personal computers and the deployment of Ethernet Local AreaNetworks during the late eighties dramatically increased the number of networks making upthe Internet. Interestingly, TCP/IP was easily able to encompass both technological shiftsfrom mainframe to personal computers and from wide area to local area networks.At the same time, TCP/IP has enabled the many rapid and accessible applications on theInternet that we rely on today, including email, the World Wide Web, Instant Messaging,Peer-to-Peer transfers, and a wide range of collaboration and conferencing tools. These developmentshave helped make Information Technology a critical component across the industrialworld.

At the time it was designed the TCP/IP protocol was recognized as being very innovative.However I am sure that even Bob and Vint never imagined that they had created the essentialunderpinnings of today's planetary Internet.

Nearly a billion users are now connected to the Internet. Only people working in computernetworking know how it really works. Very few people know how it got here. Probably, hardlyanyone knows that a SATNET node was installed in Pisa in the middle of the 80s. Thiswas the third European node, after the ones installed at the University College of Londonand NTE in Norway.

Specifically, towards the end of the 70s, Bob Kahn visited CNUCE, an Institute of the CNR,the Italian Research Council, located in Pisa, for discussing the extension of SATNET toItaly. At that time CNUCE was about to finish a similar project at a European level namedSTELLA (Satellite Transmission Experiment Linking LAboratories). This meant that CNUCEhad the necessary competences for collaborating with the SATNET research community.In that period fruitful discussions occurred between researchers from Pisa and from the USA.On various occasions Bob and Vint visited CNUCE. And on one of them the configurationof the Italian SATNET node was set up. Well, it took almost one year before CNR approvedthe acquisition of that node. But a few days after this happened there was a technologicalenhancement in the SATNET node which moved from a small and cheap minicomputerto a very powerful and expensive multiprocessor computer, named butterfly gateway. Thebutterfly gateway was officially announced in one of the International Cooperation Boardmeetings, which I was attending. You can imagine how I felt! I remember I informed all theattendees that I had decided to give up working on the Italian SATNET node project. Tohave the new order approved it would have taken another whole year. And in any case theremight have been another technological improvement in the meantime! Well, Bob broughtforward the coffee break and suddenly disappeared into a corner with Vint. When the meetingrestarted, Bob stood up and said: Luciano, I have some very good news for you. We willfinance the Italian butterfly gateway so that you can get on with the activation of the Italiannode! I must confess this was the first and last time in my life in which bureaucracy hasproduced a positive result.

Before I conclude this laudation, I would just like to highlight what Vint and Bob have beenup to since the design of the Internet.

Dr. Kahn is Chairman, CEO and President of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives,which he founded in 1986 after a thirteen-year term at ARPA. This corporationwas created as a non-profit organization to provide leadership and funding for research anddevelopment of the National Information Infrastructure which later became more widelyknown as the Information Super Highway. In his recent work, Dr. Kahn has been developingthe concept of a Digital Object Architecture as a key middleware component of the NationalInformation Infrastructure.

Dr. Cerf recently joined Google from MCI, where he had led technology advancements since1982, with a break to return to research at the Corporation for National Research Initiativesfrom 1986 to 1994. The Internet Society or ISOC was started in 1991 and Vint became thefirst president. On his return to MCI in 1994, he helped to put MCI on the Internet map.Vint is also working on the Interplanetary Network, a project of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab,which aims to extend the Internet into outer space for planet-to-planet communications.Furthermore, he continues in his role as the Chairman of the Internet Corporation for AssignedNames and Numbers.

Over the years, Vint and Bob have both received many awards and honours. It would takeme too long to mention all of them.

However, I would like to underline that with regard to their work on TCP/IP, the Associationfor Computing Machinery conferred on Dr. Cerf and Dr. Kahn the 2004 A. M. TuringAward. This award is widely considered to be the informatics equivalent to the Nobel Prize.

Well, that brings me to the end of my laudation. It just remains for me to say that it is a greathonour to have Dr. Cerf and Dr. Kahn here with us today in Pisa. And I would like to takethis opportunity on behalf of the University, and everyone here in the audience, to thankBob and Vint for their huge contribution not just to the world of information technologybut to the world in general.

Ultimo aggionamento documento: 27-Jun-2006