Press Release

Media Advisory: To our Computer History Museum media community...

Mountain View, California  |  January 03, 2007

The Computer History Museum is pleased to announce another exciting year of events, beginning next Tuesday, January 9, 2007, with Computer History Museum 2006 Fellow Robert Kahn. This promises to be an intimate and insightful evening to be sure.

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to meet one of the visionary architects and personalities responsible for creating the essential underpinnings of the Internet! Kahn will be interviewed by Museum Trustee Ed Feigenbaum, a computer scientist known worldwide for his pioneering work in the field of artificial intelligence.

Please RSVP. We look forward to having you with us.

Pertinent details follow below.


Computer History Museum Presents:

Where:

Computer History Museum
Hahn Auditorium
1401 N. Shoreline Blvd.
Mountain View, CA 94043
Directions

When:  

Tuesday, January 9, 2007
6 - 7 pm Member Reception
Wine provided by The Mountain Winery
7 - 9 pm Lecture

Registration:    

Free. Suggested donation of $10.00 at the door from non-members.

To register or for more information on the event, please visit the Museum's Web site at http://www.computerhistory.org/kahn_01092007
or all (650) 810-1005.

Speaker Bio:     

Kahn is chairman, CEO and president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), which he founded in 1986 after a 13 year term at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). CNRI was created as a not-for-profit organization to provide leadership and funding for research and development of the National Information Infrastructure.

After receiving a B.E.E. from the City College of New York in 1960, Kahn earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University in 1962 and 1964 respectively. He worked on the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories and then became an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT. He took a leave of absence from MIT to join Bolt Beranek and Newman, where he was responsible for the system design of the Arpanet, the first packet-switched network. In 1972 he moved to DARPA and subsequently became Director of DARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). While Director of IPTO he initiated the US government's billion dollar Strategic Computing Program, the largest computer research and development program ever undertaken by the federal government. Kahn conceived the idea of open-architecture networking. Together with Computer History Museum Fellow Vinton Cerf, he is a co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols, a set of communications standards that enable different com! puter networks to share information, giving the Internet its power and reach.

In his recent work, Kahn has been developing the concept of a digital object architecture as a key middleware component of the NII. He is a co-inventor of Knowbot programs, mobile software agents in the network environment.

Kahn is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a former member of its Computer Science and Technology Board, a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of AAAI, a Fellow of ACM and a Fellow of the Computer History Museum. He is a former member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, a former member of the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine and the President's Advisory Council on the National Information Infrastructure.

Some of Kahn’s awards include the AFIPS Harry Goode Memorial Award, the Marconi Award, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the President's Award from ACM, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computer and Communications Award, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal, the ACM Software Systems Award, the Computerworld/Smithsonian Award, the ASIS Special Award and the Public Service Award from the Computing Research Board. He has twice received the Secretary of Defense Civilian Service Award. He is a recipient of the 1997 National Medal of Technology, the 2001 Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, the 2002 Prince of Asturias Award, and the 2004 A. M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2005, he was awarded the Townsend Harris Medal from the Alumni Association of the City College of New York, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May 2006.

Kahn has received honorary degrees from Princeton University, University of Pavia, ETH Zurich, University of Maryland, George Mason University, the University of Central Florida and the University of Pisa, and an honorary fellowship from the University College, London.

Background:  

The Computer History Museum Presents speaker series is an exclusive platform for open, passionate discussions for presenting the computing revolution and its impact on the human experience. These landmark presentations and panel discussions present inside stories and personal insights of top information age leaders from industry, government and academia, and assist the Museum in bringing computing history to life.

About the Computer History Museum

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, a public benefit organization with a 25-year history as part of the former Boston Computer Museum, preserves and presents for posterity the artifacts and stories of the information age. The Museum is dedicated to exploring the social impact of computing and is home to the world's largest collection of computing-related items -- from hardware (mainframes, PCs, handhelds, integrated circuits), to software, to computer graphics systems, to the Internet and networking. The collection also includes photos, films, videos, documents, publications, and advertising and marketing materials.

Currently in its first phase, the Museum brings computing history to life through its popular speaker series, seminars, oral histories and workshops. The Museum also offers self-guided and docent-led tours of "Visible Storage," where nearly 600 objects from the collection are on display. A new exhibit, “Mastering The Game: A History of Computer Chess,” opened in September 2005. Please check the Web site for open hours. Future phases will feature full museum exhibits and educational programs, including a timeline of computing history, theme galleries, a research center, and much more. For more information, please visit www.computerhistory.org or call 650.810.1010.

Press Contacts:

PR Team
pr@computerhistory.org
(650) 810-1059

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