COMPUTING SEMINAR

*** PLEASE NOTE UNUSUAL DAY, TIME, AND PLACE ***

ABSTRACT

The networking community has been challenged to develop a Next Generation Internet offering performance hundreds or thousands of times superior to that of the current Internet and scalable to millions of end-points. This performance would support life-critical and safety-critical applications in health care, banking, air traffic control, national security, environmental monitoring and disaster response, and will emerge as a critical infrastructure component for many military systems.

But such applications demand much more than speed: they also require predictably reliable and secure operation, self-management, and guarantees of integrity even when perturbed by transient failures or crashes of non-critical application components. The existing Internet is incapable of supporting applications with these properties. What needs to be done?

Biography:

Ken Birman is Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University where he has studied distributed systems security and reliability issues since 1981. In 1987 he founded a company, Isis Distributed Systems, which developed robust software solutions for stock exchanges, air traffic control, and factory automation. Isis currently operates as a division of Stratus Computer Inc. and Birman has founded a second company, Reliable Network Solutions Inc. He is the author of a recent book, "Building Secure and Reliable Network Applications", (Prentice Hall and Manning Publishing Company; 1997), and has written many articles on the subject, including one that appeared in Scientific American in May, 1996. At Cornell, Birman heads the Horus and Ensemble projects.

URL's:
http://www.browsebooks.com/Birman/index.html
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/Projects/HORUS/