NY Times reports that Cerf/Kahn to receive Turing Award

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Craig Partridge <craig () aland bbn com>
Reply-To: Craig Partridge <craig () aland bbn com>
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 06:50:27 -0500
To: <dave () farber net>
Subject: NY Times reports that Cerf/Kahn to receive Turing Award


[for IP if you deem appropriate]

Hi Dave:

Today's New York Times reports Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn are to receive
this year's Turing Award.

The Times article also reports extensively about concerns that this award
would cause some further debate about who deserves credit for what
inventions that led to the Internet.

Speaking as the person who organized the nomination of Cerf and Kahn at
the request of ACM SIGCOMM, I offer two observations.

First, at last year's ACM Awards Banquet, several people noted that it was
great that Alan Kay (the 2004 Turing Award winner) was finally getting
recognition, and this led to a discussion of what areas of computer
science had not received recognition through the Turing Award.  Networking
seemed to be first on everyone's lips.

Second, a comment about the politics and pragmatism of awards.  ACM's
awards processes are, thankfully,  not terribly political.
But one odd quirk is that the Turing award committee has had some
(privately confessed) difficulty figuring out where networking fits in
computer science.  There's been some instinct to wonder if much of what
we do in networking isn't mathematics (e.g. queueing theory) or engineering
and thus something to recognize via some other award.

So SIGCOMM quietly canvassed a number of senior people inside and outside
the networking field, and we developed a list of people who had made
contributions, and especially computer science contributions, deemed
comparable to the contributions of past Turing Award recipients.  It
is a surprisingly long list.  One painful realization was that we're
about 20 years late in starting to recognize networking.  As a result
we've got pioneers who started working in the 1960s and 1970s who
are overdue for recognition, competing (in some sense) with extremely
talented and productive folks who started work in the 1980s and who are
now emerging as deserving of recognition in their own right.

In that light, I view the recognition of Bob and Vint as opening a door.
Now that the Turing Award has recognized networking as an important part
of computer science, it becomes easier to nominate others of our deserving
colleagues a few years down the road.  And it doesn't hurt that Vint and
Bob are two of the nicer guys I know, and thus wonderful people to have
open the door.

Craig

E-mail: craig () aland bbn com or craig () bbn com

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