IEEE Life Fellow Robert E. Kahn, broadly generally known as one of many “fathers of the Internet,” is the recipient of the 2024 IEEE Medal of Honor. He is being acknowledged for “pioneering technical and leadership contributions in packet communication technologies and foundations of the Internet.”
The IEEE Foundation sponsors the annual award.
While working as a program supervisor within the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s data processing strategies workplace in 1973, Kahn and IEEE Life Fellow Vint Cerf designed the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol. The TCP manages knowledge packets despatched over the Internet, ensuring they don’t get misplaced, are obtained within the correct order, and are reassembled at their vacation spot appropriately. The IP manages the addressing and forwarding of information to and from its correct locations. Together they make up the Internet’s core structure and allow computer systems to attach and trade data.
“Bob Kahn’s contributions to the lifestyle, commerce, and culture of modern society are extensive and unequaled,” mentioned one of many endorsers of the award. “It was his leadership and dedicated efforts in the application of the packet network concept that led to the development of the Internet, which has become indispensable to our society.”
Kahn is president and CEO of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, which he based in 1986. The nonprofit, primarily based in Reston, Va., undertakes, fosters, and promotes analysis within the strategic improvement of network-based data applied sciences. It additionally supplies management and funding for data infrastructure analysis and improvement.
A fruitful profession at DARPA
Kahn started working in laptop networking in 1966 when he joined Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, Mass. There he was answerable for the system design of the ARPANET, the primary packet-switched community. The mission, funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, was the precursor to the Internet. (ARPA is now generally known as DARPA.)
It was throughout that point that he met Cerf, who helped write ARPANET’s communication protocol.
In 1972 Kahn left BBN to turn out to be a program supervisor in DARPA’s data processing strategies workplace, which invested in laptop {hardware} and software program analysis. He continued to work on the ARPANET and arranged the primary public demonstration of the community on the 1972 International Conference on Computer Communications, held in Washington, D.C.
Khan quickly after conceived the thought of open-architecture networking. In March 1973 he recruited Cerf to assist him make his concept into actuality. At the time, Cerf was an assistant professor of laptop science and electrical engineering at Stanford.
It took the 2 of them six months to flesh out what they referred to as the TCP, which supplies networks with end-to-end reliability, error restoration, and congestion management. The TCP launched the idea of IP addresses.
After a decade of testing, the protocol suite was formally adopted by the ARPANET in 1983.
That similar yr Kahn was promoted to director of the data processing strategies workplace. He launched a number of initiatives together with the U.S. authorities’s Strategic Computing Program. It funded the event and implementation of multiprocessor laptop architectures with main investments in pure language processing, speech understanding, picture understanding, and skilled programs.
After 13 years at DARPA, Kahn left the group in 1986 to launch the Corporation for National Research Initiatives.
Together with Cerf, Kahn in 1992 based the Internet Society, a nonprofit group that helps set technical requirements, develops Internet infrastructure, and advises policymakers.
Kahn has obtained a number of recognitions for his work, together with the 2004 Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He additionally obtained the 1997 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal along with Cerf.