Cerf and his wife Sigrid both have hearing deficiencies; they met at a hearing aid agent's practice in the 1960s,[18] leading him to advocate for accessibility. They later joined a Methodist church and had two sons, David and Bennett.[19]
He left IBM to attend graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned his M.S. degree in 1970 and his PhD in 1972.[6][20] Cerf studied under Professor Gerald Estrin and worked in Professor Leonard Kleinrock's data packet networking group that connected the first two nodes of the ARPANET,[21] the first node[21] on the Internet, and "contributed to a host-to-host protocol" for the ARPANET.[22]
Cerf worked as assistant professor at Stanford University from 1972 to 1976 where he conducted research on packet network interconnection protocols and co-designed the DoD TCP/IP protocol suite with Kahn.[22]
From 1973 to 1982, Cerf worked at the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and funded various groups to develop TCP/IP, packet radio (PRNET), packet satellite (SATNET) and packet security technology.[24] These efforts were rooted in the needs of the military.[25][26][27] In the late 1980s, Cerf moved to MCI where he helped develop the first commercial email system (MCI Mail) to be connected to the Internet, in 1989.[28][29]
Cerf is active in a number of global humanitarian organizations.[30] Cerf typically appears in a three-piece suit; a rarity in an industry known for its casual dress norms.[31][32]
As vice president of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982 to 1986, Cerf led the engineering of MCI Mail, which became the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet in 1989.[28][33] In 1986, he joined Bob Kahn at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives as its vice president, working with Kahn on Digital Libraries, Knowledge Robots, and gigabit speed networks. Since 1988 Cerf lobbied for the privatization of the internet.[34] In 1992, he and Kahn, among others, founded the Internet Society (ISOC) to provide leadership in education, policy and standards related to the Internet. Cerf served as the first president of ISOC. Cerf rejoined MCI in 1994 and served as Senior Vice President of Technology Strategy. In this role, he helped to guide corporate strategy development from a technical perspective. Previously, he served as MCI's senior vice president of Architecture and Technology, leading a team of architects and engineers to design advanced networking frameworks, including Internet-based solutions for delivering a combination of data, information, voice and video services for business and consumer use.
During 1997, Cerf joined the board of trustees of Gallaudet University, a university for the education of the deaf and hard-of-hearing.[35] Cerf himself is hard of hearing.[36] He has also served on the university's Board of Associates.[37]
Cerf, as leader of MCI's internet business, was criticized due to MCI's role in providing the IP addresses used by Send-Safe.com, a vendor of spamware that uses a botnet in order to send spam. MCI refused to terminate the spamware vendor.[38][39] At the time, Spamhaus also listed MCI as the ISP with the most Spamhaus Block List listings.[40]
Cerf has worked for Google as a vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist since October 2005.[5] In this function he has become well known for his predictions on how technology will affect future society, encompassing such areas as artificial intelligence, environmentalism, the advent of IPv6 and the transformation of the television industry and its delivery model.[41]
Cerf helped fund and establish ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. He joined the board in 1999 and served until November 2007.[43] He was chairman from November 2000 to his departure from the board.
Cerf was a member of Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov's IT Advisory Council (from March 2002 to January 2012). He is also a member of the advisory board of Eurasia Group, the political risk consultancy.[44]
Cerf is also working on the Interplanetary Internet, together with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other NASA laboratories. It will be a new standard to communicate from planet to planet, using radio/laser communications that are tolerant of signal degradations including variable delay and disruption caused, for example, by celestial motion.[45]
On February 7, 2006, Cerf testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation's hearing on net neutrality. Speaking as Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, Cerf noted that nearly half of all US consumers lacked meaningful choice in broadband providers and expressed concerns that without network neutrality government regulation, broadband providers would be able to use their dominance to limit options for consumers and charge companies like Google for their use of bandwidth.[46]
Cerf at 2007 Los Angeles ICANN meeting
Cerf currently serves on the board of advisors of Scientists and Engineers for America, an organization focused on promoting sound science in American government.[47] He also serves on the advisory council of CRDF Global (Civilian Research and Development Foundation) and was on the International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Threats (IMPACT) International Advisory Board.[48]
Cerf was elected as the president of the Association for Computing Machinery in May 2012[49] and joined the Council on CyberSecurity's Board of Advisors in August 2013.[50]
From 2011 to 2016, Cerf was chairman of the board of trustees of ARIN, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) of IP addresses for the United States, Canada, and part of the Caribbean.[51] Until Fall 2015, Cerf chaired the board of directors of StopBadware, a non-profit anti-malware organization that started as a project at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.[52][53] Cerf is on the board of advisors to The Liquid Information Company Ltd of the UK, which works to make the web more usefully interactive and which has produced the Mac OS X utility called 'Liquid'.[54] Vint Cerf is a member of the CuriosityStream Advisory Board.[55]
From 2009 to 2011, Cerf was an elected member of the governing board of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP). SGIP is a public-private consortium established by NIST in 2009 and provides a forum for businesses and other stakeholder groups to participate in coordinating and accelerating development of standards for the evolving Smart Grid.[59]
Cerf was elected to a two-year term as president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) beginning July 1, 2012.[60] On January 16, 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama announced his intent to appoint Cerf to the National Science Board.[61] Cerf served until May 2018 when his six-year term expired. In 2015 Cerf co-founded (with Mei Lin Fung) and until December 2019 chaired the People-Centered Internet (PCI).[62][63]
Since at least 2015, Cerf has been raising concerns about the wide-ranging risks of digital obsolescence, the potential of losing much historic information about our time – a digital "Dark Age" or "black hole" – given the ubiquitous digital storage of text, data, images, music and more. Among the concerns are the long-term storage of, and continued reliable access to, our vast stores of present-day digital data and the associated programs, operating systems, computers and peripherals required to access such.[66][67][68][69]
Awards and honors
Cerf and Bob E. Kahn being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. BushCerf and Bulgarian President Parvanov being awarded the St. Cyril and Methodius in the Coat of Arms Order
Elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 1995 for contributions to the design and development of network protocols and leadership in the evolution of the Internet.
In December 1997 he, along with his partner Robert E. Kahn, was presented with the National Medal of Technology by President Bill Clinton, "for creating and sustaining development of Internet Protocols and continuing to provide leadership in the emerging industry of internetworking."[83][84]
In 2000, he was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for his contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering."[88]
Cerf was awarded the Award of Technology from the Telluride Tech Festival in 2002, also known as the Tesla Festival since the world's first AC hydro-power power plant was built in Telluride in 1891 by L.L. Nunn who purchased the generator and plans from George Westinghouse and Tesla.[89]
Cerf was awarded an honorary membership in the Yale Political Union after keynoting a lively debate on the subject "Resolved: Online Communities are Real Communities." The motion passed.[93]
In celebration of the five year-anniversary of YouTube he was selected as a guest curator by the site, and chose the six videos on YouTube he found most memorable.[94]
In May 2011, he was awarded an HPI Fellowship as "...a tribute to his work for a new medium which influenced the everyday life of our society like no other one."[96]
In September 2011 he was made a distinguished fellow of British Computer Society, in recognition of his outstanding contribution and service to the advancement of computing.[97]
In 2018, Cerf was awarded Catalonia's International Award[105]
In 2023, Cerf was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor for co-creating the Internet architecture and providing sustained leadership in its phenomenal growth in becoming society's critical infrastructure[106]
^ abAnon (2016). "Dr Vint Cerf ForMemRS". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on April 29, 2016. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
^(see Interview with Vinton CerfArchived June 9, 2007, at the Wayback Machine, from a January 2006 article in Government Computer News), Cerf is willing to call himself one of the internet fathers, citing Bob Kahn and Leonard Kleinrock in particular as being others with whom he should share that title.
^Wientjes, Greg (2011). Creative Genius in Technology: Mentor Principles from Life Stories of Geniuses and Visionaries of the Singularity. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. p. 93. ISBN978-1463727505.
^Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal, Carl Sunshine, Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program (RFC675, December 1974)
^Cerf, Vinton G. (April 24, 1990). "Oral history interview with Vinton G. Cerf"(PDF). University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy. Minnesota, Minneapolis: Charles Babbage Institute. p. 24. Retrieved June 4, 2020. My first introduction to somebody at DARPA other than Bob Kahn and Steve Crocker was Craig. So it was fairly early on, I think by 1973, I was under contract to carry out the INTERNET research work.
^Cerf, Vinton G. (April 24, 1990). "Oral history interview with Vinton G. Cerf"(PDF). University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy. Minnesota, Minneapolis: Charles Babbage Institute. p. 28. Retrieved June 4, 2020. we absolutely wanted to bring data communications to the field, which is what the packet radio project and the packet satellite projects were about [...]. So the whole effort was very strongly motivated by bringing computers into the field in the military and then making it possible for them to communicate with each other in the field and to assets that were in the rear of the theatre of operations. So all of the demonstrations that we did had military counterparts.
^Cerf, Vinton G. (April 24, 1990). "Oral history interview with Vinton G. Cerf"(PDF). University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy. Minnesota, Minneapolis: Charles Babbage Institute. p. 30. Retrieved June 4, 2020. This was a challenge that would use all my DARPA-acquired skills and know-how. What emerged was MCI Mail.
^Cerf, Vinton G. (2020). "Digital Democracy: Past, Present, Future". Digital Government: Research and Practice (1). Association for Computing Machinery: 1–10. doi:10.1145/3382738. S2CID211519549. I pushed for privatization as early as 1988, just five years after turning the Internet on, on the grounds that I believed that, in order to reach the general public, we needed to have an economic engine that would drive it, sustain it, make it survivable or sustainable.
^"Vinton G. Cerf, who developed together with Robert E. Kahn the TCP/IP protocol was awarded as a HPI Fellow on May 25th 2011. The HPI award is a tribute to his work for a new medium which influenced the everyday life of our society like no other one." "HPI Fellows & Guests". Archived from the original on May 20, 2011. Retrieved May 27, 2011.
Cerf, Vinton G. (2020). "Vinton Cerf: An Oral History". Stanford Historical Society Oral History Program (Interview). Interviewed by Suzanne Butler Gwiazda. Stanford, California: Stanford University.
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