Colloquia, Seminars and Conference News
Title : Computer Science as Social Science: The future of the Internet
Date : October 29, 2009. (7:00 pm) Tea starts half an hour before each seminar
Location: ITEB 336
Speaker : David Clark
Abstract:
A lesson I have learned in my 35 years of working on the Internet is
that the technologists are not in charge, and have not been in charge for at least the last 15 or 20 of those years. The forces that will shape the
future of the Internet primarily derive from the deep social, economic
and cultural embedding of the Internet. Technology will be successful if it
is responsive to these pressures. This fact is both exciting and perhaps
alarming--it is exciting to be working on a system that has had so much
impact on the world, but Computer Scientists are not normally trained to
think about these issues, and to derive from these issues what technical
problems we should address. I will give some examples, both past and
future, that suggest methods and models we can use to link what we as
technologists do to the forces in the larger world that will interact
with that technology.
Bio:David Clark is Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Since the mid 70s, Dr. Clark has
been leading the development of the Internet; from 1981- 1989 he acted as
Chief Protocol Architect in this development, and chaired the Internet
Activities Board. More recent projects include extensions to the Internet
to support real-time traffic, explicit allocation of service, pricing
and related economic issues, and policy issues surrounding the Internet,
such as local loop deployment. He has also worked on computer and
communications security. In addition to his appointment in the Computer
Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Dr. Clark operates a
program in communications policy, located at the MIT Center for
Technology, Policy and Industrial Development.
This program examines the broader context of the Internet - economics,
societal impact and policy.
The goal of his interdisciplinary research is to shape technological
innovation and business planning by articulating this larger context for
the Internet. Dr. Clark has contributed to a number of studies on the societal and policy impact of computer communications. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.
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