December 2005/January 2006

Volume 46, Number 3

STC's Honorary Fellows for 2006

Reprinted from Tieline

STC is pleased to announce that Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn, two of the "Fathers of the Internet," are the Society's honorary fellows for 2006. Cerf and Kahn will accept their award and address attendees at the opening session of STC's 53rd Annual Conference, May 7-10, 2006, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

In the early 1970s, Cerf and Kahn worked together on a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project to connect independent computer networks. Their work led them to describe what have become the standard protocols for communication between computers on the Internet: transmissioncontrol protocol (TCP), which breaks data into pieces or "packets" and routes them to host computers, and Internet protocol (IP), which addresses and forwards the packets.

For their contributions to the development of the Internet Cerf and Kahn have received many honors, most notably the U.S. National Medal of Technology in 1997; the Alan M. Turing award from the Association of Computing Machinery in 2004, considered to be the "Nobel Prize of computing"; and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, the highest civilian award given by the United States to its citizens.

As vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google, Vinton Cerf is responsible for identifying new technologies to support the development of advanced, Internet-based products and services and for encouraging the spread of Internet capacity around the world. He is also distinguished visiting scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he is working on designing an interplanetary Internet, and chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. His previous positions included senior vice president of technology strategy for MCI and vice president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), a not-for-profit organization founded by Kahn that fosters research and development in network-based information technology.

Currently chairman and CEO of CNRI, Robert Kahn previously worked on the technical staff at Bell Laboratories and as an assistant professor of electrical engineering at MIT. In the mid-1980s he coined the term "national information infrastructure," a term more widely known as the "information super highway." He is a co-inventor of Knowbot programs, mobile software agents in the network environment.

The Society bestows honorary fellowships on non-members who have made exceptional contributions to the field of technical communication. Honorary fellowships include lifetime membership in STC. Please join us in welcoming Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn to STC.