Meet Mr. Internet: Vint Cerf

It was June 1973. For the past three months, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn had been working together on a problem Kahn had been pondering for some time: how to connect ground-based military computers seamlessly to communications satellites and mobile radios.

The ARPANET and the way it handled communications was already well established. But extending it to handle multiple networks—whose reliability couldn’t be taken for granted—was a different story.

The two had been exchanging ideas in person and via email and reviewing the work of others who were trying to solve similar issues. But now, Cerf sat alone in the lobby of San Francisco’s Jack Tar Hotel, on a break from a computing conference. And the problem was on his mind.

Cerf pulled out an envelope. Recalling what the two had figured out so far, he began to sketch the main components and key interfaces. He scrawled clouds representing three different packet-switched networks—the ARPANET, packet radio, and packet satellite—and boxes representing the computers hanging off those networks. These would be the host computers, running applications that needed to use the network.

“The networks couldn’t be changed and couldn’t know that they were part of the Internet, because they already existed,” Cerf recalls recently in an interview at his office at Google, in Reston, Va.

So he sketched in another set of computers—gateways—that would know about other networks.

“Those were the constraints of the problem,” he says. “Sometimes, if you can constrain a problem enough, you can see the solution pop out in front of you. The diagram helped me to see where protocols would need to be standardized.”

Cerf describes the communication protocols that he and Kahn came up with as comparable to a set of postcards and envelopes: The postcard has a message and an address for the intended destination. The address on the envelope is either that of the destination host in the local network or of a gateway that leads toward the next network along the route to the final destination.

When a message arrives at that next gateway, the gateway opens the envelope and checks the address on the postcard. If the message is intended for a destination inside the gateway’s home network, it gets delivered in an appropriate envelope; if not, it goes in an envelope addressed to the next gateway en route to the destination network, where the process repeats.

That, essentially, is how the Internet works today.

For the past five decades, Cerf, now 79, has been perfecting, extending, and evangelizing the Internet. It is for this—his contributions in cocreating the Internet architecture and his leadership in its growth to date—that Cerf is the recipient of the 2023 IEEE Medal of Honor.

It started with SAGE

Cerf came to computers early; his first encounter was in 1958. When he was 15, a family friend working at System Development Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif., arranged a visit to a Semi-Automatic Ground Environment computer center. The SAGE system analyzed radar data, looking for Soviet bombers heading toward the United States.

“You literally walked inside the computer, a room with glowing red tubes on the walls,” Cerf recalls. “It was weird, but I was mesmerized.”

During high school in Van Nuys, Calif., his best friend, Steve Crocker, wrangled permission for the two to occasionally use a Bendix G-15 computer at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“That’s when I realized that you could create your own artificial world with software, and it would do what you told it to do,” Cerf says. “And there was something utterly beguiling about this idea.”

The two found it hard to stay away from UCLA’s G-15. One Saturday, Crocker recalls, the two were working on some mathematical equations they wanted the computer to solve. They went over to Engineering Building 1, where the computer was housed, and found the building locked.

“I was crestfallen,” Crocker says. “Then Vint observed that a second-floor window was open. I’m thinking, ‘Nooo…,’ but he was already on my shoulders climbing in. He went through and opened the door, and then we taped over the door latch so we could go in and out during the day.”

Cerf was just 17 when he first got paid for developing code in 1961—testing software for the Rocketdyne F-1 engine destined for NASA’s Apollo program. But when he entered Stanford University later that year, he envisioned a career in mathematics, not computer science. Then he encountered Riemannian geometry, a mathematical way of describing multidimensional surfaces.

“I broke my pick on that, realizing that I was probably not going to be a professional mathematician,” Cerf recalls. “I was relieved that I could program so at least there was a job I could do.” He took all the computer classes he could fit into his schedule.

After graduating in 1965 with a B.S. in mathematics, Cerf joined IBM as a systems engineer and was soon assigned to work with the Quiktran time-sharing system, which ran on a disappointingly old IBM 7044. After two years of tangling with Quiktran, Cerf realized there were fundamental things about computing he didn’t know, so he went back to school at UCLA.

“There are few people in the industry who have the combination of technical understanding, integrity, openness to new ideas, and kindness.”

There, he joined Crocker in a research group run by Len Kleinrock, with Gerald Estrin as their thesis advisor. Mainly, the group aimed to build a way to model the performance of the ARPANET and its gateways under different traffic conditions. But Cerf, Crocker, and a few others also thought about the computers that would attach to the network, considering what they would do and how they would do it.

It wasn’t easy, Cerf recalls. The computers had different operating systems; some even represented the characters of the alphabet differently.

Working with their counterparts at other ARPANET sites, Crocker, Cerf, and others in Kleinrock’s group eventually figured it out. And then they set about breaking the network by overloading it with artificial traffic. That mission came from Bob Kahn, then at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), the company contracted by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to build the switches for the nascent network. [For more on Kahn's ARPANET efforts, see "The Do-or-Die Moments That Determined the Fate of the Internet."]

“We shot the ARPANET down repeatedly,” Cerf says. “I was tempted to get a rubber stamp with a kind of network pattern on it to stamp the side of the computer, the way guys that shoot down airplanes stamp the sides of their planes.”

An idea called “internetting”

Cerf finished his Ph.D. in 1972, and in October he returned to Stanford as an assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering, after turning down the job a few times. (Not because he didn’t like Stanford, he says, but because he knew how smart the students were and didn’t think he had anything to teach them.)

That same month Kahn moved from BBN to what is now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). And in March 1973, he contacted Cerf.

“‘I’ve started this program called internetting,’” Cerf recalls Kahn telling him. “‘It’s intended to find ways of using computers in command and control…in mobile vehicles, in ships at sea, and in airplanes. But what we have with the ARPANET is computers sitting in air-conditioned buildings connected by dedicated telephone circuits. How are we going to hook those all together?’”

And that was the problem that Cerf were contemplating that day in San Francisco in 1973, when he put pen to envelope.

It took him and Kahn six months to flesh out what they called the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). There had to be Internet addresses, for example, to direct messages to the various networks. There had to be error correction, but performed by the computers attached to the network rather than within the network itself. The two also worried that some packets might not fit with the next network, so they included an elaborate mechanism for fragmenting packets when they needed to travel across networks that could only carry shorter packets.

Then Cerf and Kahn wrote a paper laying it all out, briefed other computer science researchers on the details, and submitted it to the IEEE Transactions on Communications. A draft of a formal TCP standard came out in December 1973.

The first real-world test came in 1975, connecting Stanford to BBN in Cambridge, Mass., and University College London. And it didn’t work as expected.

“It turned out that we needed to do a three-way handshake to synchronize the packet streams,” Cerf says. “The first host computer sends a synchronization request with a sequence number to the other one, and that one sends back a request with its sequence number and an acknowledgment of the first request. Then the first one sends back an acknowledgment.”

Eventually, after four iterations of the standard, Cerf says, things were finally looking stable. In 1976 he left Stanford for DARPA, taking over management of its Internetting program. Cerf stayed there for six years as a program manager, helping to work out the details that would make the Internet more reliable and secure. He resigned in late 1982, just before January 1983, when the Internet was to be made operational for the U.S. Defense Department, cooperating non-U.S. defense departments, and research and development contractors.

His concerns at that point, Cerf says, were purely financial. College expenses for his sons loomed on the horizon, and he worried that a government salary wouldn’t cover the costs. It was time to go commercial.

The birth of MCI Mail

Cerf joined MCI as vice president of engineering to build what the company was calling a digital post office.

“We got what we eventually called MCI Mail up and running in nine months,” Cerf says.

It wasn’t the first commercially available electronic mail service—CompuServe, Telenet, Tymnet, and others allowed subscribers to send email to other subscribers using dial-up modems. But those were isolated islands; someone using one system could not email someone on another.

MCI Mail was different. Any user of MCI Mail could communicate with users of other communications services, including telex, fax, and even the U.S. Post Office—the service would print out the message and send it via traditional mail. And it included provisions that would allow it to interconnect with other electronic mail services.

Cerf oversaw improvements to the system for three years after the launch, then left when former colleague Kahn started the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), a nonprofit contract research organization. There, Cerf focused on Internet applications and launched the Internet Society to support the continuing evolution of Internet standards.

His work on MCI Mail would have a big influence on his future work with the Internet. At that point, much of the communications going across the Internet relied on networks that had been funded at least in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF), including the NSFNet backbone network, which connected six supercomputer sites and various regional networks to thousands of U.S. universities. Other agencies funded similar networks to support their work. Use of these networks was generally restricted to researchers and academics, with commercial activity, businesses, and the general public banned. Cerf, recalling the challenge of getting MCI Mail to connect to the Telex system and different email providers, wanted to change that policy.

He went to the Federal Networking Council, an organization of the four government agencies—DARPA, the Department of Energy, NASA, and the NSF—that were funding much of the Internet’s rollout. He asked for permission to run a little experiment—to connect MCI Mail to the NSFNet backbone and see if it would work with the email system currently used on the Internet.

He got the okay, and CNRI announced the project in June 1989. Immediately all the other commercial email services clamored to get onto the Internet backbone as well—and got permission, Cerf recalls.

“Then they discovered that because they were all now connected to the Internet, all of their customers could talk to their competitors’ customers—an unexpected consequence,” Cerf says.

Google’s Internet evangelist, not “archduke”

In 1994 Cerf went back to MCI. As senior vice president for data architecture he worked to help the company expand the Internet side of its business. He weathered years of business turmoil—mergers begun and abandoned, MCI’s acquisition by WorldCom, and finally a declaration of bankruptcy in 2003 and sale to Verizon in 2005. Once the dust had settled, Cerf sent an email to his old friend Eric Schmidt, who had been hired as CEO of Google in 2001.

“Hi Eric, would you like some help?” Cerf recalls asking.

Schmidt responded simply: “Yes.”

“That,” Cerf says, “was my job interview.” The toughest detail to work out with Schmidt and Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin was Cerf’s title.

“I said, ‘How about “archduke”?’” he recalls.

After some thought, Page and Brin responded, “The previous archduke was Ferdinand. He was assassinated and that started World War I, so maybe that’s a bad title. Why don’t you be chief Internet evangelist?”

Cerf agreed, and he holds that title to this day, overseeing a small group that deals with Internet policy and standardization issues out of offices in Reston, Va. He meets regularly with members of governing bodies around the world to discuss issues involving Internet regulation, a perennial battle between what freedoms to allow and what activities to regulate. He also keeps a hand in technical work on Internet protocols, including areas in which protocol development might lead to harmful side effects on either Google or the public.

Cerf is often described as the consummate statesman of the Internet world. Judith Estrin, a serial entrepreneur and former chief technology officer of Cisco Systems, has known Cerf as a family friend, a research supervisor, and a fellow networking industry executive. “There are few people in the industry who have the combination of technical understanding, integrity, openness to new ideas, and kindness,” she says. “It is rare for someone to be as capable as he is and as wonderful a person. He is always professional. He is also infinitely curious; so many people get to a place in their careers where they don’t think they need to learn anymore, but his curiosity continues to be fascinating and wonderful.”

Cerf embraced the statesman role early on. Testifying before Congress in his early days at DARPA, he wore a three-piece suit. It became a trademark; few today can recall seeing him dressed in anything else. And he knows how to use that image for effect.

“In 1992, when Vint was part of the Internet Architecture Board of the Internet Engineering Task Force, there was a tense time around the future addressing scheme of the Internet,” Steve Crocker recalls. “The IETF met, but the head of the architecture board couldn’t make it, so Vint was going to run the meeting. As the meeting began, he took off his coat, then his vest, eventually getting down to his T-shirt. It was so out of character, it brought the house down and instantly lowered the temperature of the meeting.”

The Internet to-do list

Even after 50 years, Cerf says, the Internet needs work. “I got involved in this and haven’t stopped because there’s always more to be done. It doesn’t get boring, ever.”

The to-do list for those involved in Internet protocol development includes domain-name system security—preventing domain names from being hijacked for nefarious purposes and improving resilience, so that a shutdown in one part of the world doesn’t cause problems elsewhere.

Cerf doesn’t work directly to police problematic uses of the Internet. “When people ask, ‘How could you let that happen?’ my answer is, ‘Well, we gave you a bunch of rules to keep trucks, motorcycles, and automobiles from running into each other, but you get to decide what’s in the cars and trains and what buildings to put next to the highways,” he says.

He admits that this answer doesn’t always cut it. So he tries to help people who want to make the Internet a safer place “see that some of their solutions have unwanted side effects. You don’t want to use a mallet to squash a fly, breaking the network unnecessarily.”

Connecting planets and diverse creatures

There are other Internets to be architected. Cerf points to his office whiteboard, where a scrawled diagram looks something like a complicated version of that first sketch for the Internet. The diagram is part of the design-in-progress for the Interplanetary Internet, an effort to connect a future Internet on the moon, other planets, and traveling space probes to one another and the terrestrial Internet.

“It requires a different set of protocols,” Cerf explains, “because TCP is not designed to do flow control with a 40-minute round trip. The problem gets worse when you go to the outer planets. Instead of minutes, it’s hours or even days. And the planets are rotating, disrupting communication. So we had to develop delay-and-disruption-tolerant networking, a protocol we now call the Bundle Protocol Suite.” Cerf has been working on the Interplanetary Internet since 1998; the effort has grown from a handful of people to hundreds today.

“Patience and persistence,” Cerf says. That’s been his motto throughout his career. “I’m not going to see the end of this. I feel like I’m in chapter two of what will be a much longer story about the history of interplanetary networking.”

Then there is the Interspecies Internet, an effort launched in 2007 by Cerf, Diana Reiss, director of the animal behavior and conservation graduate programs at Hunter College, in New York City; Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms; and musician Peter Gabriel. This global think tank now has more than 4,500 members and is looking to AI to help translate the signals from one species into those that other species can understand.

“It’s been a slow process,” Cerf says, “but it’s like all my other projects—it might take decades.

“I feel like Lewis and Clark, wandering in a landscape full of ideas and endless frontiers. Software, and therefore computer communication, simply has no limits. You never know what you are going to turn up next.”

Vinton G. Cerf

Current job: Vice president and chief Internet evangelist, Google

Date of birth: 23 June 1943

Birthplace: New Haven, Conn.

Family: Sigrid, his wife; sons David and Bennett

Education: B.S. 1965, mathematics, Stanford; M.S. 1970 and Ph.D. 1972, computer science, University of California, Los Angeles

First job: Cleaning and refilling automatic coffee machines, at age 14

First job in software: Rocketdyne, working on test software for the F-1 engines used in the Apollo program’s Saturn V rocket

Biggest surprise in career: “The explosive use of the Internet”

Patents: Two, for an “Internet Radio Communication System” and for a “System of Distributed Task Execution”

Heroes: Bob Kahn, Steve Crocker, Gerald Estrin

Most recent book read: The Music of the Bees, by Eileen Garvin

Favorite books: Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement

Favorite kind of music: Classical before 1900, particularly Wagner

Favorite websites: Google, Wordle, USA Today’s Sudoku and crossword puzzles, OnlineJigsawpuzzles.net

Favorite food: Häagen Daz coffee ice cream

Motto: Patience and persistence count

Key organizational memberships: IEEE, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Academy for the Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, British Computer Society, the Royal Society, the U.S. National Academies of Science and Engineering

Major awards: IEEE Medal of Honor “for cocreating the Internet architecture and providing sustained leadership in its phenomenal growth in becoming society’s critical infrastructure,” ACM Turing Award, Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, VinFuture Prize, U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation, Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Japan Prize

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Timber! The World’s First Wooden Transistor

Transistors inside modern computer chips are several nanometers across, and switch on and off at hundreds of gigahertz. Organic electrochemical transistors, made for biodegradable applications, are milimeters in size and switch at kilohertz rates. The world’s first wooden transistor, made by a collaboration of researchers through the Wallenberg Wood Science Center and reported this week in Publications of the National Academy of Sciences, is 3 centimeters across and switches at less than one Hertz. While it may not be powering any wood-based supercomputers anytime soon, it does hold out promise for specialized applications including biodegradable computing and implanting in into living plant material.

“It was very curiosity-driven,” says Isak Engquist, a professor at Linköping University who led the effort. “We thought: ‘Can we do it? Let’s do it, let’s put it out there to the scientific community and hope that someone else has something where they see these could actually be of use in reality.’”

“I have colleagues who are at the forefront in a field we call electronic plants. ... We have worked with dead woods for this project, but the next step might be to integrate it also into living plants.”
—Isak Engquist, Linköping University

Even though the wooden transistor still awaits its killer app, the idea to build wood-based electronics is not as crazy as it sounds. A recent review of wood-based materials reads, “Around 300 million years of tree evolution has yielded over 60,000 woody species, each of which is an engineering masterpiece of nature.” Wood has great structural stability while being highly porous and efficiently transporting water and nutrients. The researchers leveraged these properties to create conducting channels inside the wood’s pores and electrochemically modulate their conductivity with the help of a penetrating electrolyte.

Of the 60,000 species, the team chose balsa wood for its strength, even when one of the components of its structure—lignin—was largely removed to make more room for conducting materials. To remove much of the lignin, pieces of balsa wood were treated with heat and chemicals for five hours. Then, the remaining cellulose-based structure was coated with a conducting polymer. The team tried several polymers but found one known as PEDOT:PSS to be the most effective, in part because it’s water soluble. Since the pores inside wood are made for transporting water, the PEDOT:PSS solution readily spread through the tubes. Electron microscopy and X-ray imaging of the result revealed that the polymer decorated the insides of the tube structures. The resulting wood chunks conducted electricity along their fibers.

To assemble a transistor, the researchers used three pieces of conducting wood, each 3 centimeters in length and several millimeters in height and width, arranged in a T-shape. The top of the T served as the transistor channel, with a source on one end and a drain on the other. The channel was sandwiched between two ‘gate’ pieces, forming the leg of the T. At the points of contact between the channel and the gates, they layered a gel electrolyte. A voltage applied to the gates delivers hydrogen ions from the electrolyte into the polymer, causing a chemical reaction that changes the conductivity of the polymer. This reaction is reversible, allowing for the on-off operation of this wood-based transistor.

“I think this opens up a really interesting space. This is really just the beginning I believe.”
—Daniel Simon, Linköping University

This was a proof-of-principle effort, and, Engquist says, higher currents and smaller devices should be possible to engineer. Even still, it is unlikely to serve as the basis for complex electronics. However, it may find uses as an on/off switch for other components, such as solar cells, batteries, or sensors, that may be incorporated into wood, dead or living. “I have colleagues who are at the forefront in a field we call electronic plants,” Enquist says, “and they try to integrate electronic functionality into living plants. We have worked with dead woods for this project, but the next step might be to integrate it also into living plants.”

A potential advantage of the wooden transistor is that it’s self-supporting: It does not require a substrate to be printed or deposited onto. Organic electrochemical transistors—versatile devices that are heavily researched for biosensing and bioelectronics applications—strive to be made from sustainable materials. Yet, they still require glass or other substrates which are not sustainably sourced. “If we really do move to renewable or forest-based or bio-based materials,” says Daniel Simon, Professor of Bioelectronics at Linköping University who was not involved in the work, “not just as an additive, but as the actual structural components of the device, I think this opens up a really interesting space. This is really just the beginning I believe.”

That said, these applications are still hypothetical, and the work, the researchers say, was done in the spirit of collaborative curiosity. “What was really important in this project was that we were very cross-disciplinary,” Engquist says. “We would not have a chance to have done this without the wooden cellulose experts. And they, on the other hand, would never have thought of incorporating transistors into the wood that they are expertly treating in so many different ways. So it was only when we came together that we were able to do this, and I hope very much that that kind of collaboration in other places will find a use for what we have been doing here.”

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Sensitive data is being leaked from servers running Salesforce software

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Servers running software sold by Salesforce are leaking sensitive data managed by government agencies, banks, and other organizations, according to a post published Friday by KrebsOnSecurity.

At least five separate sites run by the state of Vermont permitted access to sensitive data to anyone, Brian Krebs reported. The state’s Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program was among those affected. It exposed applicants’ full names, Social Security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and bank account numbers. Like the other organizations providing public access to private data, Vermont used Salesforce Community, a cloud-based software product designed to make it easy for organizations to quickly create websites.

Another affected Salesforce customer was Columbus, Ohio-based Huntington Bank. It recently acquired TCF Bank, which used Salesforce Community to process commercial loans. Data fields exposed included names, addresses, Social Security numbers, titles, federal IDs, IP addresses, average monthly payrolls, and loan amounts.

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IEEE Leaders Are Planning Now for 2050 and Beyond

The year 2050 might sound like a long way off, but it’s just around the corner for IEEE leaders. Technology developments are happening so quickly and on so many fronts that if the organization wants to continue to thrive, it needs to begin preparing for changes now.

“IEEE must become exceedingly nimble to address rapid changes in technologies and interdisciplinary needs, and to attract a broader audience,” K.J. Ray Liu, 2022 IEEE president and CEO, wrote in his December column in The Institute. In the column, he discussed his vision for what IEEE could look like in 2050, and he outlined opportunities and challenges ahead.

Last year Liu formed the Ad Hoc Committee on IEEE in 2050 to assist IEEE in meeting the needs of the future by planning now. The committee was tasked with identifying the changes the organization might need to make while beginning to develop long-term strategies for the future.

Chaired by IEEE Fellow Roger Fujii, the committee worked with futurists from around the world to gather geographically representative projections of the world in 2050. They developed plausible scenarios of the future based on the research, identified how the information would impact IEEE and its business, and explored potential strategies. The committee released its findings in the “IEEE in 2050 and Beyond” white paper.

While IEEE’s mission and vision are likely to remain relevant in the future, how the organization supports its mission must change, according to the committee’s work. According to the committee’s research, IEEE’s current structure, areas of interest, programs and services, and sources of funding are not likely to align well with the potential futures of the global environment.

“Now is the time for the IEEE to be thoughtful, bold, and take risks,” the report notes. “Expecting the future to be like the present overlooks weak signals of change and misses important potential signs for the future. It is critical that conversations around the future begin with IEEE leadership immediately and be expanded carefully and thoughtfully across the wider IEEE community.”

Here is a summary of recommendations from the report related to governance and structure, membership, publishing, standards development, education, funding, and more.

Governance and organization

One suggestion from the committee’s research is for IEEE to rethink the structure of the organization’s governance to increase its ability to be adaptable, agile, flexible, and to act with speed. Parts of the organization might consider moving from top-down leadership styles to those that are bottom-up, according to the report.

“We cannot continue to operate the way we are organized today, so that requires a shift and also appropriate governance rules changes,” Fujii says. “Also, we need to have a structure that is more agile, and that’s going to require some hard thinking.”

The white paper recommends that the Board conduct research to explore future governance and organizational structures.

Engagement and membership

The white paper explains that engagement models and membership will likely look different in 2050 from today. Traditional membership in IEEE is highly likely to decline.

Membership is apt to be more diverse and interdisciplinary, the paper says. Future members won’t just be professionals with technical degrees; they’ll have broader and more diverse backgrounds.

IEEE will probably expand beyond the 45 technical disciplines it currently supports to attract a wider base of constituents.

The way IEEE interacts with members will have to change, according to the report. Because the next generation of members is likely to be composed of digital natives who rely on mobile devices as their primary interface source, they will expect a frictionless experience. Building online platforms that allow people to quickly access what they want will be important.

The committee expects most gatherings in the future will incorporate artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and digital twins, which are virtual models of a real-world object or system that can be used to assess how the real-world counterpart is performing.

Making use of those technologies to organize meetings, including ones held virtually, will create more opportunities for engagement.

However, “despite the growth in virtual gatherings, there will still be value in physical participation in local and global gatherings,” the report said.

Many of today’s meetings are hybrid events, with conference papers being available virtually and discussions taking place in person, the report notes. But by 2050 the integration of in-person and virtual attendance is expected to be seamless.

People likely will continue to organize around technical topics of interest, the report said, but they also will want to discuss social and environmental issues.

IEEE should continue to explore the organization’s potential future engagement and membership models, and their revenue sources, the report said.

Products and services of the future

IEEE will likely maintain its reputation as a trusted, neutral provider of quality, peer-reviewed content. But how the information is curated and delivered will change, according to the report. The initial vetting of content, for example, probably will be either partially or fully automated.

The committee expects that future content will be a compendium of articles, algorithms, videos, and other media. Access to some of the material might require users to pay a fee.

Fujii says IEEE has mostly focused its publications on the research community, but for practicing engineers most of the material is not relevant. Many IEEE research papers today are meant “to advance technology in specific, narrow technology silos,” he says. But, “the younger generation is interested in solving grand challenges such as climate change, and our papers don’t address them.”

To become more meaningful to a broader audience, the white paper recommended that IEEE should focus more on how research can be applied.

IEEE has an opportunity to assist the public by curating information that fosters a better understanding of the benefits and risks associated with artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and other technologies that are expected to be used in a variety of everyday applications.

“Now is the time for the IEEE to be thoughtful, bold, and take risks.”

The report recommends that IEEE explore intelligent search-application services in collaboration with third-party developers for AI, AR, and VR.

The committee anticipates that IEEE will continue to support the educational and capacity-building needs of people who use STEM-related products, services, and solutions through on-demand offerings of multimodal modules including a combination of text, images, and audio.

AI and related technologies will be able to anticipate an individual’s learning needs. For example, specialized AI with some human insight will filter and prioritize information that matters most to learners, avoiding information overload, according to the report.

IEEE is known for its trusted and vetted content, Fujii says, and “therefore, the role of AI in future IEEE activities must comply with ethical principles and technical correctness.”

Making technical standards more relevant

IEEE is likely to remain relevant as a standards developer in 2050 and beyond. IEEE standards, for example, could contribute to a global initiative to define how AI is designed and employed, according to the report.

IEEE’s standards activity is highly likely to remain important because technological innovation is happening so rapidly. But standards development also needs to evolve and accelerate to address the rapid changes in technology, the report says.

“Standards processes will need to become faster and more modular to maintain relevance,” the white paper says. “Disruption regarding the revenue generated from standards setting is likely. It will be important to strategize and address this quickly to minimize the disruption.”

The committee’s report recommends that IEEE research how it brings together its different services and products to address mission-based topics that interest its constituents and new stakeholders.

New funding opportunities

Membership-related income could change from a dues-paying model to a subscription-based one, according to the white paper.

Instead of depending on member dues, IEEE could consider revenue streams such as skill-building programs and sponsored activities. Corporate membership could become a substantial revenue stream. Charging for access to IEEE’s research data or to its experts could help the organization thrive, according to the report.

“Shifts in traditional IEEE funding sources need to be closely monitored,” the report noted. “IEEE should begin conversations now with corporate sponsors, particularly those with an international focus. In addition, IEEE should continue to explore non-dues revenue including monetizing the applications relative to data-collection and analysis.”

Subgroups to implement recommendations

The committee has acted on the white paper recommendations by forming six subgroups to explore opportunities. One is looking at potential governance and organizational structures. Another is focused on using AI, AR, VR, and similar technologies to improve the publications business and other areas. Research is being conducted into how to improve products and services such as educational offerings and standards development.

The group on engagement and membership of the future is working on how to interest young engineers. Another group working on mission-focused activities is looking into how to engage and organize people who want to work together to address grand challenges such as climate change. A group is tracking technology trends and taking a broader look at potential drivers of change.

“The task of operationalizing the recommendations is not to be minimized,” the report concluded. “Many of these initiatives will need serious research and consideration. IEEE should consider piloting test models to make incremental changes to minimize organizational disruption. To prepare for 2050, significant change must occur.”

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What Is Bluesky and Could It Replace Twitter?

Some Twitter users are rushing to join Bluesky, a social platform funded by Jack Dorsey, a founder of Twitter.

Little Robots Learn to Drive Fast in the Real World

Without a lifetime of experience to build on like humans have (and totally take for granted), robots that want to learn a new skill often have to start from scratch. Reinforcement learning is a technique that lets robots learn new skills through trial and error, but especially in the case of learning end-to-end vision based control policies, it takes a lot of time because the real world is a weirdly-lit friction-filled obstacle-y mess that robots can’t understand without a frequently impractical amount of effort.

Roboticists at UC Berkeley have vastly sped up this process by doing the same kind of cheating that humans do—instead of starting from scratch, you start with some previous experience that helps get you going. By leveraging a “foundation model” that was pre-trained on robots driving themselves around, the researchers were able to get a small-scale robotic rally car to teach itself to race around indoor and outdoor tracks, matching human performance after just 20 minutes of practice.

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That first pre-training stage happens at your leisure, by manually driving a robot (that isn’t necessarily the robot that will be doing the task that you care about) around different environments. The goal of doing this isn’t to teach the robot to drive fast around a course, but instead to teach it the basics of not running into stuff.

With that pre-trained “foundation model” in place, when you then move over to the little robotic rally car, it no longer has to start from scratch. Instead, you can plop it onto the course you want it to learn, drive it around once slowly to show it where you want it to go, and then let it go fully autonomous, training itself to drive faster and faster. With a low-resolution, front-facing camera and some basic state estimation, the robot attempts to reach the next checkpoint on the course as quickly as possible, leading to some interesting emergent behaviors:

The system learns the concept of a “racing line,” finding a smooth path through the lap and maximizing its speed through tight corners and chicanes. The robot learns to carry its speed into the apex, then brakes sharply to turn and accelerates out of the corner, to minimize the driving duration. With a low-friction surface, the policy learns to over-steer slightly when turning, drifting into the corner to achieve fast rotation without braking during the turn. In outdoor environments, the learned policy is also able to distinguish ground characteristics, preferring smooth, high-traction areas on and around concrete paths over areas with tall grass that impedes the robot’s motion.

The other clever bit here is the reset feature, which is necessary in real world training. When training in simulation, it’s super easy to reset a robot that fails, but outside of simulation, a failure can (by definition) end the training if the robot gets itself stuck somehow. That’s not a big deal if you want to spend all your time minding the robot while it learns, but if you have something better to do, the robot needs to be able to train autonomously from start to finish. In this case, if the robot hasn’t moved at least 0.5 meters in the previous three seconds, it knows that it’s stuck, and will execute a simple behavior of turning randomly, backing up, and then trying to drive forward again, which gets it unstuck eventually.

During indoor and outdoor experiments, the robot was able to learn aggressive driving comparable to a human expert after just 20 minutes of autonomous practice, which the researchers say “provides strong validation that deep reinforcement learning can indeed be a viable tool for learning real-world policies even from raw images, when combined with appropriate pre-training and implemented in the context of an autonomous training framework.” It’s going to take a lot more work to implement this sort of thing safely on a larger platform, but this little car is taking the first few laps in the right direction just as quickly as it possibly can.

FastRLAP: A System for Learning High-Speed Driving via Deep RL and Autonomous Practicing, by Kyle Stachowicz, Arjun Bhorkar, Dhruv Shah, Ilya Kostrikov, and Sergey Levine from UC Berkeley, is available on arXiv.

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New York’s Transit Agency Quits Sharing Updates on Twitter

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority said it would no longer provide service information on Twitter because the “reliability of the platform can no longer be guaranteed.”

Deepfake Drake, HatGPT and Ben Smith on the End of the BuzzFeed Era

Is A.I. the future of the music industry? Musicians are split.

Snap’s Sales Fall for First Time as a Public Company

As other tech companies returned to growth, Snap continued to struggle with advertising sales and lost money in the first quarter.

Snap’s Sales Fall for First Time as a Public Company

As other tech companies returned to growth, Snap continued to struggle with advertising sales and lost money in the first quarter.

F.B.I. Searches Home of Top FTX Executive

Ryan Salame, a former top FTX executive and a prolific Republican donor, faces mounting legal pressure for his role in Sam Bankman-Fried’s business empire.

Elon Musk Ramps Up A.I. Efforts, Even as He Warns of Dangers

The billionaire plans to compete with OpenAI, the ChatGPT developer he helped found, while calling out the potential harms of artificial intelligence.

Elon Musk Ramps Up A.I. Efforts, Even as He Warns of Dangers

The billionaire plans to compete with OpenAI, the ChatGPT developer he helped found, while calling out the potential harms of artificial intelligence.

Meta Returns to Growth After Struggling With Falling Sales

The owner of Facebook and Instagram reported a 3 percent revenue increase in the latest quarter, even as spending rose and profits fell.

Tweets Become Harder to Believe as Labels Change Meaning

The elimination of check marks that helped authenticate accounts has convulsed a platform that once seemed indispensable for following breaking news.

Recognize Those Who Inspire Others to Uphold Ethical Principles

Do you know someone who has risen above others in demonstrating high standards of ethics and integrity? Or do you belong to an organization that has inspired others to share a vision of extraordinary ethical principles and practices? If so, IEEE wants to honor and celebrate their contributions.

The IEEE Ethics and Member Conduct Committee is now accepting nominations for this year’s IEEE Award for Distinguished Ethical Practices. The annual award recognizes an IEEE member, or an organization employing IEEE members, for exemplary ethical behavior or persuasive advocacy of ethical practices.

Nominators will be asked to explain:

• What situation was happening (or not happening) that caused the nominee to believe it was unethical?
• In what ways did the nominee demonstrate ethical leadership, courage, innovation, or honor to make the situation better?
• What was the overall impact of the nominee’s actions?

The deadline for nominations is 31 May. The recipient will be announced in November.

For more information, including eligibility requirements, and to access the nomination form, visit the EMCC-Award web page or write to ethics@ieee.org.

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Binance Faces Mounting Pressure as U.S. Crypto Crackdown Intensifies

The scrutiny on Binance, the giant cryptocurrency exchange, has sent new tremors through a market that is still bruised by the implosion of FTX.

Commerce Dept. Outlines Plans to Fund Cutting-Edge Chip Research

The Biden administration announced its strategy for the National Semiconductor Technology Center, a string of facilities aimed at propelling U.S. innovation.

ChatGPT now allows disabling chat history, declining training, and exporting data

Enlarge (credit: OpenAI / Stable Diffusion)

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced new controls for ChatGPT users that allow them to turn off chat history, simultaneously opting out of providing that conversation history as data for training AI models. Also, users can now export chat history for local storage.

The new controls, which rolled out to all ChatGPT users today, can be found in ChatGPT settings. Conversations that begin with the chat history disabled won't be used to train and improve the ChatGPT model, nor will they appear in the history sidebar. OpenAI will retain the conversations internally for 30 days and review them "only when needed to monitor for abuse" before permanently deleting them.

However, users who wish to opt out of providing data to OpenAI for training will lose the conversation history feature. It's unclear why users cannot use conversation history while simultaneously opting out of model training.

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Alphabet Shrugs Off Advertising Slump, Driven by Search Engine

Google’s parent company returned to sales growth, even as an advertising slowdown continued to crimp YouTube.

Japanese Moon Landing Is Uncertain After Losing Signal Spacecraft

The Japanese company aimed to be the first to change the paradigm for transporting things to the moon, but that will have to wait for a future mission.

Why Researchers Turned This Goldfish Into a Cyborg

Neuroscientists are examining how fish navigate their world using different brain circuits unlike than those relied on by mammals like us.

Exploit released for 9.8-severity PaperCut flaw already under attack

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Exploit code for a critical printer software vulnerability became publicly available on Monday in a release that may exacerbate the threat of malware attacks that have already been underway for the past five days.

The vulnerability resides in print management software known as PaperCut, which the company’s website says has more than 100 million users from 70,000 organizations. When this post went live, the Shodan search engine showed that close to 1,700 instances of the software were exposed to the Internet.

World map showing locations of PaperCut installations.

Last Wednesday, PaperCut warned that a critical vulnerability it patched in the software in March was under active attack against machines that had yet to install the March update. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023–27350, carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible 10. It allows an unauthenticated attacker to remotely execute malicious code without needing to log in or provide a password. A related vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023–27351 with a severity rating of 8.2, allows unauthenticated attackers to extract usernames, full names, email addresses, and other potentially sensitive data from unpatched servers.

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Grimes says anyone can AI-generate her voice “without penalty”

Enlarge / Grimes attends The 2021 Met Gala Celebrating In America: A Lexicon Of Fashion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 13, 2021, in New York City. (credit: Theo Wargo/Getty Images)

On Sunday night, Canadian musician Grimes tweeted that she would split 50 percent royalties on "any successful AI generated song" that uses her voice, reports The Verge. As an independent artist, Grimes says anyone can use her voice without penalty. "I have no label and no legal bindings," she says.

Her announcement comes after controversy over an unauthorized song featuring AI-generated vocals of Drake and The Weeknd that went viral earlier this month. Shortly after its reveal, the song got pulled from YouTube and other social media platforms under unclear circumstances, which The Verge reports could have been a botched fan tribute or a marketing stunt.

I'll split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice. Same deal as I would with any artist i collab with. Feel free to use my voice without penalty. I have no label and no legal bindings. pic.twitter.com/KIY60B5uqt

— 𝔊𝔯𝔦𝔪𝔢𝔰 (@Grimezsz) April 24, 2023

Grimes is no stranger to the AI and tech cultural scene, having written music about AI and tweeted about the subject frequently. In February, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted an unlabeled photo of himself with Grimes and AI critic Eliezer Yudkowsky. Grimes also shares two children with her former partner Elon Musk, who recently signed a letter urging the slowdown of AI model development.

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Get to Know the IEEE Board of Directors

The IEEE Board of Directors shapes the future direction of IEEE and is committed to ensuring IEEE remains a strong and vibrant organization—serving the needs of its members and the engineering and technology community worldwide—while fulfilling the IEEE mission of advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.

This article features IEEE Board of Directors members Theresa Brunasso, Vickie Ozburn, and Ali H. Sayed.

IEEE Senior Member Theresa Brunasso

Director, Region 3: Southeastern United States

Theresa Brunasso is an IEEE senior member and the director of IEEE Region 3 (Southeastern United States).Theresa Brunasso

Brunasso, who has more than 30 years of experience in electrical engineering, specializes in electromagnetics. Her work includes designing and developing RF, microwave, and millimeter wave components and subsystems for the defense and aerospace industries.

Brunasso has said that her favorite—and what she thinks is the coolest—project was leading the team responsible for winning the contract to build the Ka-Band radar antenna used to land the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on Mars. The team developed the antenna to be rugged, compact, and lightweight. She also led the design of the microwave feed for the antenna, which yielded low side lobes. Brunasso and the rest of the team were awarded a certificate of appreciation from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for meeting the challenging requirements on a tight schedule.

Brunasso, an active IEEE volunteer, is a member of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society and the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society. She has served as the IEEE Atlanta Section’s secretary, vice chair, and chair. She was one of three Georgia women honored in 2008 as part of the ninth annual Women of the Year in Technology Awards. The award recognizes the winners as “Women of Impact” for their accomplishments as business leaders, visionaries of technology, and women who make a difference in their communities.

Brunasso has presented papers at the IEEE International Microwave Symposium, the IEEE Radar Conference, and the IEEE Ultra-Wideband Conference. She is a member of Sigma Pi Sigma, the National Physics Honor Society and HKN. She is set to speak at the 2023 IEEE Vision, Innovation, and Challenges Summit and Honors Ceremony, to be held on 5 May in Atlanta.

IEEE Senior Member Vickie Ozburn

Director, Region 4: Central United States

IEEE Senior Member Vickie Ozburn is the director of IEEE Region 4 (Central United States).Read Photography

Ozburn’s mission, she says, as director of IEEE Region 4 is to use her leadership talents to inspire, encourage, and collaborate. She has more than 30 years of experience in leadership, project management, engineering management, quality, software engineering, and production. Ozburn says she enjoys working on projects that allow opportunities to reach across markets to dream, design, and build without limits. She works within an Avionics business unit, where they enable safe flight through their products and services. Her focus is on keeping passengers, flight crews, and militaries safe, connected, and informed.

A member of the IEEE Computer Society, Ozburn has been an active IEEE volunteer for more than 17 years. She has held several leadership positions on committees within her section and region. The committees set strategies and goals for the region. Ozburn prides herself on bringing forth many creative ideas and initiatives and, more importantly, laying out explicit courses of action and steps to assist IEEE members. She is a founding member of the IEEE Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Section’s Women In Engineering Affinity Group.

As a member of the IEEE Board of Directors, she dedicates her time and effort to promoting and growing membership and engaging IEEE members to use their skills and diversity of thought to address real-world problems.

Ozburn received the IEEE Cedar Rapids Section’s Ted A. Hunter Award for outstanding individual service in furthering the section’s purposes and objectives. She was honored with the 2016 Collins Aerospace Enterprise Women’s Champion of the Year Award and the 2013 Women’s Forum Contributor of the Year Award.

IEEE Fellow Ali H. Sayed

Director, Division 9

An IEEE Fellow, Ali H. Sayed is director of IEEE Division 9.EPFL

Sayed is a leader in designing adaptive systems and developing learning methodologies to drive their operation. These are intelligent systems with self-learning abilities, which are used across many fields including in communication systems, guidance and control, biomedical instrumentation, and AI-driven machines. Sayed’s research focuses on adaptation and learning theories, data and network sciences, statistical inference, and multiple-agent systems. His research team develops algorithms and theories that have taken the understanding of adaptive systems to a new level. He has co-authored several textbooks that have helped train generations of researchers and practitioners in the art of adaptation and learning.

As an active IEEE volunteer, Sayed is familiar with the needs of IEEE members, especially students, young professionals, and members in industry. In 2018 and 2019 he served as president of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, where he promoted initiatives in favor of a more diverse and inclusive society. Sayed says IEEE is an “impressive network of professionals from academia, industry, government, and the private sector,”and their knowledge is a formidable force for the common good. As a member of the IEEE Board of Directors, he has promoted policies that strengthen educational and job-training opportunities, bolster student mentorships and industry internships, and encourage open access and open science programs.

He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and The World Academy of Sciences. He has authored more than 600 scholarly publications and nine books. Sayed has also won several recognitions, including the 2022 IEEE Fourier Technical Field Award and the 2020 IEEE Norbert Wiener Society Award.

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Stability AI launches StableLM, an open source ChatGPT alternative

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of a "Stochastic Parrot" created by Stability AI. (credit: Benj Edwards / Stability AI / Stable Diffusion XL)

On Wednesday, Stability AI released a new family of open source AI language models called StableLM. Stability hopes to repeat the catalyzing effects of its Stable Diffusion open source image synthesis model, launched in 2022. With refinement, StableLM could be used to build an open source alternative to ChatGPT.

StableLM is currently available in alpha form on GitHub in 3 billion and 7 billion parameter model sizes, with 15 billion and 65 billion parameter models to follow, according to Stability. The company is releasing the models under the Creative Commons BY-SA-4.0 license, which requires that adaptations must credit the original creator and share the same license.

Stability AI Ltd. is a London-based firm that has positioned itself as an open source rival to OpenAI, which, despite its "open" name, rarely releases open source models and keeps its neural network weights—the mass of numbers that defines the core functionality of an AI model—proprietary.

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German Magazine Editor Is Fired Over Fake Michael Schumacher Interview

Die Aktuelle promoted an interview as the first with the retired Formula 1 driver since a 2013 accident. But artificial intelligence had generated the responses.