Bob Metcalfe to Deliver ACM A.M. Turing Award Lecture at The Web Conference 2023

April 18, 2023

2022 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Bob Metcalfe will be delivering his Turing Lecture, "Connectivity," at The Web Conference 2023 on Sunday, April 30, 5 pm CT (10 pm UTC). The lecture will be available via livestream.

In "Connectivity," Metcalfe will examine the most important and impactful influence on the human condition in recent history—the Internet, which itself could not exist without Ethernet. He will reminisce and reflect upon the history of Ethernet: from its invention 50 years ago in order to provide local connectivity between personal computers in the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, to its evolution utilizing internet protocols, to a legacy that can be found today in packets to the desktop, abundance of bandwidth, and standardization. All of this progress would ultimately lead to two-thirds of the human race (5 billion people) around the world being connected via the Internet.

Metcalfe received the 2022 ACM A.M. Turing Award for the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet. He is an Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at The University of Texas at Austin and a Research Affiliate in Computational Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).