November 6, 2009
Pakistani Exchange Students Study Technology in Herndon
By Leslie Perales 
Observer Staff Writer
A group of Pakistani exchange students swarmed around Google’s Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf on Monday after he finished talking about how far the Internet has come in the last four decades.
The students are in the United States as part of the United States Agency for International Development’s program, ED-Links. The program is designed to help implement quality education at the middle and secondary school levels in both rural and urban areas of Pakistan. The students were taking classes at the Center for Innovative Technology with KZO Education.
Phil Cruver, president of KZO, said in the first year of the program many of the students came from urban areas where there was some access to technology and this year’s students are from rural areas with very limited access to technology. He said while some of the students have computers in their homes very few have Internet access. KZO Education is a subcontractor to the five-year program.
During the presentation Cerf said one of the best features of the Internet was that it was not designed for any particular application and simply provided a method for the transfer of data and communications. He explained how e-mail and the Internet have changed the way people communicate and how social media has risen to prominence.
Cerf said Google’s programs such as Maps, Earth, Android and Wave are also based on the idea of being free technology that is open to others contributions. People are also beginning to see Internet connection in unexpected places, such as photo frames, refrigerators and even surfboards.
The next place the Internet may be going is into outer space, Cerf said. He said in 1998 he began working on a project called InterPlaNet that is working to create a network for the Internet to be operable on other planets and spacecraft. He said it is being tested on Earth and on the international space station.
When a student asked Cerf what the best part of the advent of the Internet is he said, “It is capable of supporting almost anything you can think of.” He said the idea for the Internet came to him from a problem that was posed to him in 1973 by Robert Kahn. He said they worked together to find solutions to a problem that had many constraints and the first part of the technology they came up with was the router, which they referred to as gateways.
In the 1970s computer networking already existed but each technology company had their own way of doing it, Cerf said. He said they wanted to find a way for all the technology companies to be able to communicate with each other through a globally accessible network and they wanted it to be easy enough to be adopted as the international standard. If they would have done anything differently, Cerf said he would have made the Internet more secure, more mobile and given it more space for Internet protocol addresses.
Cerf said his favorite environment for hashing out ideas is while standing with a few others in front of a whiteboard, drawing out ideas. He said he enjoys stimulating group brainstorming and enjoys when people come to him with problems. “Engineers like to solve problems,” he said.
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