Often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” the 2004 A.M. Turing award will be awarded to Dr. Vinton G. Cerf and Dr. Robert E. Kahn, who worked together in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1973 and published “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection,” a the work that laid the foundation for the TCP/IP core.
“Their work has enabled the many rapid and accessible applications on the Internet that we rely on today, including email, the world wide web, instant messaging, peer-to-peer transfers and a wide range of collaboration and conferencing tools,” said ACM President David Patterson.
Both researchers participated in an Advanced Research Projects Agency project designed to link three independent networks into a “network of networks.”
After initial setbacks in the project, the pair began to believe that the networks would need to use “gateways” – now referred to as routers – to connect to each other. In order to affect that change, they decided to begin designating host computers and created IP addresses for that purpose.
A year later, the duo published a paper detailing a new method of computer communication and introduced transmission-control protocol (TCP). The new communication method broke information into little packets of data which included “datagrams” that contained the data’s destination, its origination point and routing information.
Cerf and Kahn have received a variety of awards over the years for their invention, including a 1997 National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton.
The A.M. Turing award itself, first handed out in 1966, carries with it a $100,000 prize and receives financial backing from Intel.
“The Turing Award is widely acknowledged as our industry’s highest recognition of the scientists and engineers whose innovations have fueled the digital revolution,” said David Tennenhouse, vice president of Intel’s Corporate Technology Group. “As a fellow DARPA alumnus, I am especially pleased to congratulate this year’s winners, who are outstanding role models, mentors and research collaborators to myself and many others within the network research community.”
The award is named for Alan M. Turing, a British mathematician who is often credited with creating some early prototype computers, served as a key contributor in the breaking of the German Enigma cipher during World War II and began the first research into machine intelligence.
Cerf and Kahn will receive the award during the annual ACM Awards Banquent on June 11 in San Francisco.