Van Jacobson
Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Template:Use American English
Van Jacobson is an American computer scientist, renowned for his work on TCP/IP network performance and scaling.<ref name=SIGCOM-2001>2001 SIGCOMM Award for Lifetime Achievement to Van Jacobson "for contributions to protocol architecture and congestion control."</ref> He is one of the primary contributors to the TCP/IP protocol stack—the technological foundation of today’s Internet.<ref>"Van Jacobson Biography", IEEE Global History Network, accessed 31 March 2012</ref> Since 2013, Jacobson is an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) working on Named Data Networking.
Early life and educationEdit
Jacobson studied Modern Poetry, Physics, and Mathematics and received an M.S. in physics and a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Arizona.<ref>"An Analysis of TCP Processing Overhead" (Biography), David D. Clark, et al., IEEE Communications Magazine, June 1989, p. 29</ref> He did graduate work at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.<ref>Borsook, Paulina. "Profile: Van Jacobson keeps communications channels open", Network World, March 24, 1994, p. 51</ref>
CareerEdit
His work redesigning TCP/IP's congestion control algorithms (Jacobson's algorithm)<ref>"Congestion avoidance and control", Van Jacobson, Proceedings of SIGCOMM ’88, Stanford, CA, Aug. 1988, ACM</ref><ref>"Congestion avoidance and control", Van Jacobson, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review - Special twenty-fifth anniversary issue, Highlights from 25 years of the Computer Communication Review, Volume 25 Issue 1, Jan. 1995, pp.157-187</ref> to better handle congestion is said to have saved the Internet from collapsing in the late 1980s and early 1990s.<ref name=IEEE-2002>"Van Jacobson: 2002 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award Recipient", IEEE web site</ref> He is also known for the TCP/IP Header Compression protocol described in RFC 1144: Compressing TCP/IP Headers for Low-Speed Serial Links,Template:Ref RFC popularly known as Van Jacobson TCP/IP Header Compression.
He is the co-author of several widely used network diagnostic tools, including traceroute, tcpdump, and pathchar. He was a leader in the development of the multicast backbone (MBone)<ref>""Building the Internet's MBone: LBL's Van Jacobson a Principal Architect", Jeffery Kahn, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 9 December 1994</ref> and the multimedia tools vic,<ref>"vic - Video Conferencing Tool", web page at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory</ref> vat,<ref>"vat - LBL Audio Conferencing Tool", web page at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory</ref> and wb.<ref>"wb - LBNL Whiteboard Tool", web page at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory</ref>
Jacobson worked at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory from 1974 to 1998 as a Research scientist in the Real-time Controls Group and later group leader for the Network Research Group.<ref>"LBNL's Network Research Group", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, August 2009</ref> He was Chief Scientist at Cisco Systems from 1998 to 2000.<ref>Van Jacobson: Past and Current Positions in "TCP/IP pioneer's past is prologue", Loring Wirbel, EE Times, March 7, 2005</ref> In 2000 he became Chief Scientist for Packet Design, Inc. and in 2002 for a spin-off, Precision I/O.<ref>Packet Design, website</ref> He joined PARC as a research fellow in August 2006.
In January 2006 at Linux.conf.au, Jacobson presented another idea about network performance improvement, which has since been referred to as network channels.<ref>"Speeding up Networking", Van Jacobson and Bob Felderman, Linux.conf.au 2006, Dunedin, NZ</ref> Jacobson discussed his ideas on Named data networking (NDN), the focus of his work at PARC, in August 2006 as part of the Google Tech Talks.<ref>"Content-centric networking", PARC A Xerox Company</ref><ref>"A New Way to look at Networking", Van Jacobson, Google Tech Talk, 30 August 2006, YouTube Video</ref> Van Jacobson is now working with the NDN Consortium funded by the National Science Foundation to explore and create the future of the internet.
Awards and membershipsEdit
Van Jacobson together with his colleague at LBL, Steven McCanne, won R&D Magazine's 1995 R&D 100 Award for development of a software toolpack that enables multiparty audio and visual conferencing via the MBone (Multicast Backbone).<ref>" Lab's connection to the MBone wins '95 R&D 100 Award", Bruce Davies, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory</ref>
For his work, Jacobson received the 2001 ACM SIGCOMM Award for Lifetime Achievement "for contributions to protocol architecture and congestion control",<ref name=SIGCOM-2001/> the 2002 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award,<ref name=IEEE-2002/> and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004 for his "contributions to network protocols, including multicasting and the control of congestion."<ref>"Mr. Van Jacobson", Members Directory, National Academy of Engineering</ref>
In 2012, Jacobson was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.<ref>2012 Inductees, Internet Hall of Fame website. Last accessed April 24, 2012</ref>
See alsoEdit
ReferencesEdit
External linksEdit
- Template:Webarchive
- Template:Webarchive
- Van Jacobson Denies Averting Internet Meltdown in 1980s (Cade Metz, Wired, 2012-05-25)