The Internet – Coming of Age
Thursday May 7, 2009, 5:00 pm in Room 304, BU School of Management, 595 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston
Speaker: Louis Pouzin
Louis Pouzin is one of the pioneers of computer communications. He invented the concept of datagams or connectionless communication as the foundation for modern networking. As the director of the Cyclades project at the Institut de Recherche d’Informatique et d’Automatique (IRIA) in France in the 1970’s , he designed and directed the development of the Cyclades network, the first to use datagrams and the concept of end-to-end protocols, later adopted by internet.
The lecture will present an overview of the current state of the Internet and the critical issues that may affect its future, such as Internet governance, control of critical resources, addressing issues, and business applicability of the current Internet platform. It will also address the effectiveness of the network, which was primarily developed based on technical expertise, in a multi-polar world, where politics, language, culture and religion have to be integrated, and will provide some hints about the possible future of the Internet.
Pouzin graduated from Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, and has served as Dean of Information Technology at THESEUS, a France Telecom Institute. While at Project MAC at MIT in the 1960’s he invented the shell. For his capital contributions to computer science and networking, Pouzin has received numerous awards, such as IFIP Silver Core award, the ACM SIGCOMM award, the IEEE Internet awards, and the French Légion d’Honneur, and has published more than 80 articles and a book on computer networks.
For any additional information please contact:
John Day day@bu.edu, Lou Chitkushev LTC@bu.edu or Ibrahim Matta at matta@bu.edu .