Internet Protocol designer Vinton Cerf, vice-president and chief Internet evangelist for Google Inc., will discuss the current state of the Internet and the evolving technologies to support it, University of Waterloo next week. He is also expected to raise some issues about technical challenges yet to be faced by the Web as an industry. His talk, entitled Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century, will be held Thursday, June 21, at 1:30 p.m. in the humanities theatre, located in the J. G. Hagey Hall of the Humanities. Admission is free.

The public talk is part of the 2006-2007 Distinguished Speaker Series of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at UW.

"The topic will have broad appeal. Attracting a speaker of this caliber certainly speaks to UW's and this community's reputation as a centre for technological innovation," says school director Tamer Özsu.

Over the years, the Internet has grown dramatically from its initial experimental form (three networks) to a burgeoning world infrastructure of significant value and utility. Cerf will look at some problems requiring research to solve and others representing thorny policy issues of international scope, such as spam, denial of service attacks, abuses of domain names, fraud and harassment.

"We will also see how network-oriented applications are becoming very popular both for reliability reasons and also to enable collaborative work," Cerf says in an abstract of his upcoming talk. "As consumer devices become part of the Internet, we will discover new kinds of network-based services that allow third parties to help users manage their entertainment and work."

As well, he will discuss the extension of the Internet to operation across the solar system as a communication infrastructure in support of manned and robotic space exploration.

At Google, Cerf is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies to support the development of advanced Internet-based products and services. He is also an active public face for Google in the Internet world.

Cerf is the co-designer of TCP/IP protocols, the basic communication language of the Internet, and the architecture of the Internet. In December 1997, then-president Bill Clinton presented the U.S. National Medal of Technology to Cerf and his colleague, Robert E. Kahn, for founding and developing the Internet. Kahn and Cerf were named the recipients of the ACM Alan M. Turing award, sometimes called the Nobel prize of computer science, in 2004 for their work on the Internet protocols.