because it represents creative opportunities for future generations of researchers. I think it would be interesting to study retroactively why certain applications (for example, Twitter, Facebook) grew so popular while others failed so that we can try to be better at prediction. Perhaps a lens based on behavioral economics of the sort pioneered by (Nobel Prize winning economist) Daniel Kahneman and his colleague, Amos Tversky may help.

What concerns you about the Internet?

I am concerned about the Bal-kanization of the Internet as nation-states cut off and censor Internet traffic and corporations create closed enclaves. I fear the power of the Internet is being lost. I realize this is partly because of security concerns but am confident about advanced technology developments that can ameliorate these concerns.

 

You have had a remarkable career of academic excellence (network performance evaluation clearly begun with your thesis and your later work with your UCLA students), real-world impact (you were heavily involved in the evolution of the Internet including helping write the famous Gore proposal), and entrepreneurship (you have started several companies including Linkabit (with Jacobs and Viterbi, which later led to Qualcomm) and Nomadix (an early mobile wireless company). What advice do you have for ACM members?

First, think deeply about the results of your work. It is not enough to evaluate your ideas. You need to keep thinking about them to distill principles before moving on to the next big thing. Second, try to bounce ideas among brilliant people. I have had the fortune of doing so with folks like Shannon, Sutherland, and colleagues like Gerald Estrin at UCLA. Third, aspire like Shannon to combine physical intuition with mathematical analysis. While I have done a fair amount of mathematical work, I am an engineer at heart. My early building of a crystal radio remains a watershed event in my life.

 

George Varghese ( [e-mail]) is Chancellor’s Professor, Computer Science, at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

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asynchronous updates, something we take for granted today. Mario Gerla provided optimal routing design and provided an effective protocol. Parviz Kermani’s thesis introduced the idea of cut-through routing, that is, starting to forward a packet as soon as the router read the destination address, thereby reducing latency, which is pervasive today in Local Area Networks. Farouk Kamoun’s thesis introduced and showed the enormous benefits of hierarchical routing, which we see in OSPF areas today. Simon Lam and Fouad Tobagi initiated the analysis and design of wireless networking and provided the early analysis of Slotted Aloha (Lam) and CSMA (Tobagi). And so on.

 

And the triumvirate: Gerla, Tobagi, Lam—all full professors at UCLA, Stanford, and Texas (Austin) respectively— and winners of major networking lifetime awards.

Mario and I worked on network design techniques that went beyond my thesis while Howie Frank and Ivan Frisch were concurrently working on different techniques at Network Analysis corporation. Mario went to work for Howie Frank but we later hired him back at UCLA. Simon’s thesis came out of the satellite packet switching meetings we had where he was my right-hand man. Out of that came his dissertation on the analysis of the instability of Aloha that Abramson had created in Hawaii. Then ARPA started moving to packet radio on a metropolitan area networking basis. The application was to foot soldiers or possibly tanks moving across a battlefield; that led to the SURAN survival radio network, and the whole packet-radio project. Tobagi and I started studying CSMA—carrier sense multiple access—which eventually contributed to Ethernet.

Their theses led to a cottage industry in both network design ( popular in the 1970s) and to media access schemes (which continue to be popular today because of 802.11 and WiFi).

That early work caught the attention of researchers and industry as we continued studying the behavior of networking at large. We were fortunate to be working on these problems at an early stage.

Let’s wind up by asking you about the future. In the old days, they would say “Young man, go West.” You did that literally (Los Angeles) and metaphorically (the Internet was the new frontier, the Wild West of communication). Is networking now merely boring infrastructure like plumbing. What advice do you have for young researchers?

I think there is an enormous amount of exciting work to be done in networking and distributed systems in general. For example, areas that are in need of innovation, research, and development include Io T, distributed ledgers, the introduction of biologically inspired principles to networking (and engineering in general), distributed intelligent systems, advanced network architectures, network security, and much more. The space is awash with great problems to dive into. In the case of distributed ledgers, the technology that underlies bitcoin, I am excited on the one hand, but concerned on the other hand. What concerns me is that billions of dollars were poured into blockchain technologies soon after its birth, thus distorting its path to proper maturity; this is because profit-seeking companies and speculators jumped on the bandwagon right away, which may lead to brittle designs. By contrast, we had 20 years without commercial interruptions in designing the Internet and those years of careful curation helped, I believe, to make the Internet more robust.

What about future applications?

As I said before, it is hard to predict. We missed the social networking revolution completely. So, in some sense, we have created an Internet that is destined to continually surprise us with new, exciting, and explosive applications; that is a good thing

I fear the power
of the Internet
is being lost.