, September 2010 Vinton Gray Cerf was born in
New Haven, Connecticut, on June 23, 1943, the son of Muriel (née Gray) and Vinton Thruston Cerf. His mother was born in Canada and was of
British,
Irish, and
French Canadian descent. His paternal ancestors emigrated from
Alsace–Lorraine to
Kentucky. Cerf attended
Van Nuys High School with
Steve Crocker and
Jon Postel. While in high school, Cerf worked at
Rocketdyne on the
Apollo program for six months and helped write statistical analysis software for the non-destructive tests of the
F-1 engines. Cerf received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from
Stanford University. After college, Cerf worked at
IBM as a
systems engineer supporting
QUIKTRAN for two years. leading him to advocate for
accessibility. They had two sons, David and Bennett. 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. 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, the first node Cerf chaired the
International Network Working Group. He wrote the first
TCP with
Yogen Dalal and
Carl Sunshine, called
Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program (), published in December 1974. 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. These efforts were rooted in the needs of the military. 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. Cerf is active in a number of global humanitarian organizations. Cerf typically appears in a
three-piece suit, a rarity in an industry known for its casual dress norms. 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. 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. 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. Cerf himself is hard of hearing. He has also served on the university's Board of Associates. 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. At the time,
Spamhaus also listed MCI as the ISP with the most Spamhaus Block List listings. Cerf has worked for
Google as a vice president and Chief
Internet Evangelist since October 2005. Cerf has served as a commissioner for the
Broadband Commission for Digital Development, a UN body which aims to make broadband internet technologies more widely available 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. 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. 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. 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. Cerf currently serves on the board of advisors of
Scientists and Engineers for America, an organization focused on promoting sound science in American government. 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. Cerf was elected as the president of the
Association for Computing Machinery in May 2012 and joined the Council on CyberSecurity's Board of Advisors in August 2013. 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. 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. 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'. Vint Cerf is a member of the
CuriosityStream Advisory Board. During 2008, Cerf chaired the
Internationalized domain name (IDNAbis) working group of the
IETF. In 2008 Cerf was a major contender to be designated the first U.S.
Chief Technology Officer by President
Barack Obama. Cerf is the co-chair of
Campus Party Silicon Valley, the US edition of one of the largest technology festivals in the world, along with
Al Gore and
Tim Berners-Lee. 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. Cerf was elected to a two-year term as president of the
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) beginning July 1, 2012. On January 16, 2013, U.S. President
Barack Obama announced his intent to appoint Cerf to the
National Science Board. 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). Cerf is also among the 15 members of governing council of
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. In June 2016, his work with NASA led to
delay-tolerant networking being installed on the
International Space Station with an aim towards an
Interplanetary Internet. 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. Cerf has been a member of the Board of Governors of the
Folger Shakespeare Library since 2015. == Awards and honors ==