Hear many stories from ARPANET, ALOHAnet, Ethernet, and Internet. After 50+ years since the first internet packets were switched, the most important new fact about the human condition is that we are now all suddenly connected. This suddenness has caused pathologies - hacking, advertising, spam, polarization, fake news, censorship - but on the other hand, extreme poverty has suddenly declined for the first time, thanks to the World Wide Web? Connectivity has evolved with various transitions and reversals, of which we can expect many more. And some of our Artificial Intelligences (AIs), still short of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), are approaching 100 trillion connection parameters.

Speaker Bio:

Robert Metcalfe is an Internet pioneer, starting at MIT in 1969. He continued switching Internet packets at Harvard University, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Stanford University, and 3Com Corporation, which he founded in 1979. He coinvented the Ethernet at Xerox Parc in 1973. He took 3Com public in 1984. He's been defending Metcalfe's Law since the 1980s. Bob received the ACM Turing Award in 2023 for the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet. He is the recipient the 2024 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering. This award recognizes his “pioneering role in the design, development, and commercialization of Ethernet, an interface for networking and file sharing between computers.”

For more information, contact Fauzia Ahmad at fauzia.ahmad@temple.edu.