IP: Visit to MS Research 16 July 2001

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

On the 16 th of July, I was in Redmond Washington to give an invitational 
talk at Microsoft Research. First let me comment on the hospitality and 
friendliness of everyone I met there. People were friendly and happy to 
talk and interchange ideas. I found the quality of researchers at MS to be 
among the highest I have seen in one place since the OLD days of Bell Labs, 
IBM  and RAND. There was a good mix of experimentation and formalism. While 
I had a limited amount of time this visit I saw a lot of different things 
and was impressed by each of what I saw and the enthusiasm of the researchers.

I had close to a full house at the talk and a lot of virtual attenders. 
They were interactive and challenging. Real good crowd.

About 1 hour after my talk, I was given a CDROM with a great packaged copy 
of my presentation -- video, slides etc. I have asked MS if I can make 
copies for IPers who might be interested. It is 630 megabytes -- a bit 
large for FTP .

I was asked to come back again and I look forward to it.

I have attached the abstract and vita they included in the talk cdrom and 
in internal announcements . Note the open statement re my testimony. I saw 
absolutely no impact from that in the welcome I was given .

Dave

Predicting the Unpredictable - The FCC and the Future of Telecommunications 
and the Internet

Dr. Farber has been immersed this past year as Chief Technologist of the 
FCC where he has had an opportunity to examine and participate in the 
attempt to control, through the regulatory process, the new communications 
world. He will bring this experience to a talk, which will explore the 
impact of advances in communications technology on our national and 
international information infrastructure. Professor Farber will share his 
insights on the philosophy of the FCC, new leadership at the FCC, and the 
future technologies such as all optical networks, broadband wireless and 
others and how these changes will impact our society and businesses.

David J. Farber is the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunications 
at the University of Pennsylvania, holding appointments in the Departments 
of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. He recently served as the 
Chief Technologist for the Federal Communications Commission. Professor 
Farber was responsible for the design of the DCS system, one of the first 
operational message based, fully distributed systems and is one of the 
authors of the SNOBOL programming language. He was one of the principals in 
the creation and implementation of CSNet, NSFNet, BITNET II, and CREN. He 
was instrumental in the creation of the NSF/DARPA funded Gigabit Network 
Testbed Initiative and served as the Chairman of the Gigabit Testbed 
Coordinating Committee. His background includes positions at Bell Labs, the 
Rand Corporation, Xerox Data Systems, the University of California at 
Irvine, and the University of Delaware. Dr. Farber was appointed by 
resident Clinton in 1998 to serve on the U.S. Presidential Advisory 
Committee on Information Technology. In addition, he is a Fellow of the 
IEEE and serves on the Board of Trustees  of  the Electronic Frontier 
Foundation. He was a 10 year alumnus of the Computer Science and 
Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the U.S. National Research Council and 
is a Fellow of the Japan Glocom Institute and of the Cyberlaw Institute. 
Dr. Farber was named one of the 25 most powerful people in networking in 
the January issue of Network World. He also served as an expert witness in 
the Microsoft anititrust trial. Unquestionably, Dr. Farber's lifetime 
significant pioneering work in telecommunications and his vision of 
electronic communication, will impact the world in the 21st century.




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