2015-11-27

DARPA Director On How to Turn Inspiration Into Innovation (video)



How to Turn Inspiration Into Innovation - DARPA [darpa.mil] Director Arati Prabhakar discusses how large organizations are sometimes uniquely fitted to research and test new ideas, in a conversation with WSJ financial editor Dennis Berman at CEO Council. Published on Nov 18, 2015

DARPA"The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. DARPA was created in 1958 as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Its purpose was to formulate and execute research and development projects to expand the frontiers of technology and science, with the aim to reach beyond immediate military requirements. The administration was responding to the Soviet launching of Sputnik 1 in 1957, and DARPA's mission was to ensure U.S. military technology would be more sophisticated than that of the nation's potential enemies." (source:  Wikipedia)

DARPA and the Internet:
"In 1973, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a research program to investigate techniques and technologies for interlinking packet networks of various kinds. The objective was to develop communication protocols which would allow networked computers to communicate transparently across multiple, linked packet networks. This was called the Internetting project and the system of networks which emerged from the research was known as the "Internet." The system of protocols which was developed over the course of this research effort became known as the TCP/IP Protocol Suite, after the two initial protocols developed: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP). In 1986, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) initiated the development of the NSFNET which, today, provides a major backbone communication service for the Internet .... A great deal of support for the Internet community has come from the U.S. Federal Government, since the Internet was originally part of a federally-funded research program and, subsequently, has become a major part of the U.S. research infrastructure. During the late 1980's, however, the population of Internet users and network constituents expanded internationally and began to include commercial facilities. Indeed, the bulk of the system today is made up of private networking facilities in educational and research institutions, businesses and in government organizations across the globe ... Over its fifteen year history, the Internet has functioned as a collaboration among cooperating parties. Certain key functions have been critical for its operation, not the least of which is the specification of the protocols by which the components of the system operate. These were originally developed in the DARPA research program mentioned above, but in the last five or six years, this work has been undertaken on a wider basis with support from Government agencies in many countries, industry and the academic community. The Internet Activities Board (IAB) was created in 1983 to guide the evolution of the TCP/IP Protocol Suite and to provide research advice to the Internet community.... Throughout the development of the Internet, its protocols and other aspects of its operation have been documented first in a series of documents called Internet Experiment Notes and, later, in a series of documents called Requests for Comment (RFCs). The latter were used initially to document the protocols of the first packet switching network developed by DARPA, the ARPANET, beginning in 1969, and have become the principal archive of information about the Internet. At present, the publication function is provided by an RFC editor." Source: A Brief History of the Internet & Related Networks | Internet Society (emphasis and link added).

See also: Did We Build the 'Right' Internet? (An Interview with Prof Andrew Russell): "... If there are true villains, they are the national security state and the self-interested capitalists. They only want to increase their status and power, and often misrepresent the importance of their role and value in the development of the Internet. But I think if we looked closely even at these 'villains', we would see simple humans, with human flaws, each pursuing a certain set of interests for reasons that made sense to them, no better or worse than the rest of us...."






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