Keynotes

Each morning to get our blood going, linux.conf.au has an invited speaker give a keynote on an important issue of relevance to the greater Open Source community. Keynote presentations are often of issues of deep importance to the greater Open Source ethos.

Vinton G. Cerf

Vinton G. Cerf has served as vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google since October 2005. In this role, he is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies to support the development of advanced, Internet-based products and services from Google. He is also an active public face for Google in the Internet world./

Cerf is the former senior vice president of Technology Strategy for MCI. In this role, Cerf was responsible for helping to guide corporate strategy development from the technical perspective. Previously, Cerf served as MCI’s senior vice president of Architecture and Technology, leading a team of architects and engineers to design advanced networking frameworks including Internet-based solutions for delivering a combination of data, information, voice and video services for business and consumer use.

Widely known as one of the "Fathers of the Internet," Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. In December 1997, President 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 in 2004 for their work on the Internet protocols. The Turing award is sometimes called the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science.” In November 2005, President George Bush awarded Cerf and Kahn the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their work. The medal is the highest civilian award given by the United States to its citizens. In April 2008, Cerf and Kahn received the prestigious Japan Prize.

Geoff Huston

Geoff is the Chief Scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the Regional Internet Registry serving the Asia Pacific region. He is an author and researcher who has been closely involved with the development of the Internet for many years, particularly in Australia, where he is known for the initial build of the Internet within the Australian academic and research sector with the Australian Academic and Research Network (AARNet).

He is a pre-eminent researcher on IPv4 exhaustion and is undertaking research into Internet infrastructure, IP Technologies and address distribution policies. Consequently, he has made many presentations to global government and technical forums including the OECD, ITU, ICANN, APEC and IETF. Prior to his role at APNIC, he was the Chief Scientist at Telstra, providing lead instruction in the construction of Telstra's Internet service offerings, domestically and internationally.

Geoff has authored many books dealing with IP technology along with many papers and columns. He has been a member of the Internet Architecture Board since 1999 and served as its Executive Director from 2001 to 2005. He is actively involved in the IETF, currently chairing two working groups.

Eric Allman

Eric Allman is the original author of Sendmail, co-founder and Chief Scientist of Sendmail, Inc., and co-author of Sendmail, published by O'Reilly and Associates. He has presented numerous papers on email and programming and while at U.C. Berkeley, he was the chief programmer on the INGRES relational database management project. He then led the Mammoth project to provide large-scale research software and hardware infrastructure. He has also designed database user and application interfaces at Britton Lee (later Sharebase) and has contributed to the Ring Array Processor project for neural-network-based speech recognition at the International Computer Science Institute.

For several years he co-authored the “C Advisor” column for Unix Review magazine and is on the Editorial Review Board of ACM Queue magazine, the Board of Trustees of Cal Performances, and is a former member of the Board of Directors of the USENIX Association. He has been active with the IETF (most recently as co-author of the DomainKeys Identified Mail specification). He received his M.S. in Computer Science from Berkeley in 1980.

Eric has had an extraordinary effect on communications throughout the world which can be seen to have had an impact on all of us in some way or another.

Mark Pesce

Mark Pesce is an inventor, writer, educator and broadcaster. He is the co-developer of the Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) which forms a basis for 3D rendering used in millions of computers worldwide. His work at US universities included initiating 3D and interactive arts programs.

As an educator, Mark founded graduate programs in interactive media at both the University of Southern California’s world-famous Cinema School, and the Australian Film, Radio and Television School. For the last six years, Mark has been a panelist and judge on the ABC’s hit series "The New Inventors", as well as a regular commentator on technology and society for Triple J's Hack, the 7.30 Report, the 7PM Project, and ABC Local Radio.

In 2006, Mark founded FutureSt, a Sydney consultancy dedicated to helping clients negotiate the challenges presented by our hyper-connected future.