Talk by Vint Cerf at the School of Computing, NUS

Seminars keep happening every week where some noted or distinguished Fellow is invited.
Today was from Vint Cerf, VP and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google.
Well, if the name still doenst ring a bell, most of us have heard of TCP and the Internet. This guy is the co-designer of TCP and the internet and is sometimes referred to as the 'Father of Internet', recipient of the Turing award and Medal of Freedom amongst others.

Since he is the Chief Internet Evangelist, he says there are only around a billion people hooked on to the internet and he has got to get the other 5billion people hooked on before he kicks the bucket :)

Few noticeable things
1. Whats most irritating is that students from this part of the world are least bothered about keeping their cell phones in silent/vibrating mode. You could hear all thedifferent kinds of funky ringtones all through out the talk.
2. When this man speaks, everyone is really attentive,not out of politeness, but the sheer experience this guy brings along with himself, shows when he speaks.

Now designing the internet or TCP when a 10MB storage space costs USD1000 is not a joke. This was way back in 70s :)

Whats most interesting about this talk was the last few slides where he mentions InterPlaNetery Internet (IPN). This is something these guys are upto teaming up with Space agencies(NASA) and Jet Propulsion Laboratory for finding ways of communicating between the man-made objects in outer space through the numerous satellites we have in the astronomical space.

For instance, the Mars Rover, when it had to communicate with the a station on the earth after landing Mars was through a radio with a small antenna with at the rate of ~28kbps. Since there is a delay of as much as 20min for the data to trickle to down to planet earth, what they decided was that you instead use the larger antenna that had a higher transmissionrate but could not transmit directly to the station on earth, but instead to another floating satellite nearby. The satellite could then transmit the data that it had collected from rover to the earth's station when it comes within the hearing range.

He and a few of the world's space agencies are now trying to standardize on protocols onecan use to help reliable transmission of data across celestial objects (of course man-made with a tranceiver fitted onto it).

His plan for the weekend -> on sunday 4pm, Pasadena time, they are having an object landing on Mars and need to see if it will communicate to their station through the satellites.

Whats yours ?

Some trivia: Vint got to meet the royal family since he was honored with soem award in Japan. This was last week. The Japanese emperor is a scientist, a Taxanomist to be precise. His main interests got to do with fish and side-effects of desalination in the seas around Japan.