Vint Cerf, internationally regarded as the Father of the Internet, spoke recently at Purdue on What IF Machines Thought Like Humans. The lecture was part of Purdue's 150th Celebration, the yearlong Ideas Festival, and the Engineering 2069 Series, sponsored by Purdue Engineering.

The lecture and a question session was part of the Purdue 150^th Celebration’s yearlong Ideas Festival and Purdue Engineering’s “Engineering 2069 series. Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocol and the architecture of the Internet that were unveiled in 1974 and led to Wi-Fi, the Ethernet, LANs, the World Wide Web, email, FTP, 3G/4G, and more. He is a Google vice president and chief Internet evangelist, or, as he told the audience, “Geek Orthodox.”

Cerf, whose talk was laced with humor, began by telling the audience that in addition to Purdue’s 150^th birthday and the 50^th anniversary of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, 2019 is the 50^th birthday of ARPAnet, the predecessor to the Internet, and of “Sesame Street.” He then focused his talk on the exciting growth of multi-layer neural networks but cautioned the audience about their limitations.

Mung Chiang (L), the John A. Edwardson of the College of Engineering, shares the stage with Vint Cerf, co-designer of the TCP/IP protocol and the architecture of the internet, as the two discuss artificial intelligence and the computer scientists who design it.

Vint Cerf is an internet pioneer and a vice president at Google. His groundbreaking work unveiled in 1974 led to Wi-Fi, the ethernet, LANs, the World Wide Web, email, FTP, and 3G/4G.

“These ideas are very deep but very narrow and tend to be brittle in ways we can’t predict,” Cerf said. “If we can’t protect how they are going to be brittle, then we should have some concerns about how we apply these technologies … I’m not arguing that all machine-learning is bad, but we should be aware of the potential.”

He also said he is concerned about the autonomy of software: “We hand autonomy off to those devices without anybody in the loop (such as those used in handling security or heating and air conditioning), and we expect them to do what they are supposed to do,” he said. “The problem is that programmers make mistakes. I’m more worried about little pieces of software that are vulnerable. The headline I’m mostly worried about is ‘100,000 Refrigerators Attack Bank of America.’ We won’t even know our devices are complicit, because they are doing everything they were supposed to do… plus what it wasn’t.”

Punyashloka Debashis, a fifth-year PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, attended Cerf’s talk and was among a group of students who met privately with him and Dean of Engineering Mung Chiang. The graduate student’s research focuses on spintronics and using the spin of an electron to represent data and improve computations. Debashis says Cerf’s lecture gave those in attendance an eye-opening look into the future. “I am inspired by Dr. Cerf's foresight in working on problems that could become important in the future. He mentioned that one of his current involvements is in designing an interplanetary Internet. I marvel at his level of foresight,” Debashis says. 

Balancing humor with the potentialities of technology, Cerf offered his audience a caveat: “As programmers, we need to be thoughtful and careful about the software we write and release into the wild.”

Vint Cert (R), Google vice president, recently engaged a Purdue audience with humor as well as insights into future technological advances. Mung Chiang, the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering, helped field questions from the audience.

Vint Cerf: What IF Machines Thought Like Humans? from April 5, 2019