About the Internet Society 

Board of Trustees

2004 Board Election

Candidates

Larry Landweber, Organisational Member

1. What is your professional background?

See Vita.

2. What country and region of the world are you from? Do you live elsewhere now? If so, temporarily or permanently?

I was born in New York. My home is in Madison WIsconsin. I am now
temporarily in Washington DC

3. What has been your involvement with the Internet to date?

See Vita

4. What has been your involvement with the Internet Society to date? How long have you been a member of the Society?

I was a Pioneer Member, a member of the Board of Trustees, VP Conferences, President and Chair of the Board of Trustees. Among my accomplishments were founding of the INET conferences, support for the Developing Countries Workshops and support for the Internet Standards process.

5. If you are elected to the Society's Board of Directors, what strengths or unique features do you believe that you would bring to the Board? What contributions will you expect to make to the Society, and how will you make them?

I have twenty five years experience working on the Internet: research projects, Internet software development/distribution, internationalization activties, developing countries support, standards development and implementation, and governance.I have worked closely with all types of of organzations, non-profit, government, commercial and educational. I am interested in supporting the continuing development of the Internet and am particularly interested in issues related to developing countries.

6. If you are elected to the Society's Board of Directors, will you have sufficient time to devote to the Board's on-going activities as well as succeed in what you hope to accomplish?

I am semi-retired. I am currently working part time as a consultant to the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the U.S. National Science Foundation. I also am participating in a research project that is investigating new architectures for the Internet that will enable 100Mbps access for all 100 million homes in the U.S. The part-time status of these activities will make it possible for me to commit time to ISOC activities.

7. Please respond to the last point above regarding your willingness and ability to raise funds for the Society or to identify and resource relevant projects.

In the past, I actively raised money for ISOC and am willing to do so again.

Lawrence H. Landweber
Landweber@aol.com

Educational and Professional Background
Lawrence H. Landweber is a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin - Madison where until July 2001 he held the John P. Morgridge Chair. He has been on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin - Madison since 1967, serving as Department Chair during 1977-79 and 1987-90. He received a B.S. in mathematics from Brooklyn College and a Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue University in 1967. In 1995, he was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He is currently a Senior Advisor to the Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering of the National Science Foundation.

Landweber has been a member of the Board of the Public Interest Registry (.org). He was a member of the Board of Trustees of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development, the parent of the Internet2 project and also served as Chair of the I2 Network Research Liaison Council. He has been President, Chairman of the Board, and Vice President for Education of the Internet Society. He has been a member of the Computer Research Association Board of Directors, the Coordinating Committee on Intercontinental Research Networks, the Office of Technology Assessment Advisory Panel on Information Technology, the Advisory Committee of the Los Alamos Computing Division, and National Research Council committees on Computer-Computer Communication Protocols, The Future of the NREN, and Information Technology Strategy for the Library of Congress. While a theoretician he was Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Automata and Computability (SIGACT).

Scientific Interests
Landweber's early research was in theoretical computer science in general, complexity theory and Petri nets, in particular. Since 1977, he has worked in the area of computer networks. An underlying goal has been the development of computer networks to support research and education. His first project, TheoryNet (1977), funded by NSF, involved an email system for theoretical computer scientists.

In 1979, Landweber proposed establishment of CSNET, the Computer Science Network. The goal of CSNET was to build a network for all U.S. university and industrial computer research groups. Funded by NSF ($5 million for 5 years), CSNET served as the first large-scale validation of the Internet concept. Landweber was Chair of the project's management committee during its early years and also led a technical project that designed and implemented an early network-based directory system, "the CSNET nameserver." By 1984, over 180 university, industrial, and government computer science departments were participating in CSNET. Later, Landweber worked with NSF on the development of the NSFNET regional/backbone model, on the network's acceptable use policy, and on other policy issues. From 1987 to 1992, he led the Wisconsin components of the NSF-DARPA-funded Gigabit Testbed and ATT-funded XUNET projects.

Landweber has been actively involved in the development of the international academic/research Internet. He helped establish the first network gateways between the U.S. and countries in Europe and Asia. The informal workshops he began organizing in 1983 led to the International Networking Conference, INET, which since 1992 has been the annual conference of the Internet Society. As Vice President of the Internet Society he helped develop the Society's Workshops for Developing Countries. These workshops have been a key factor in the spread of the Internet to developing countries.

Over the years Landweber has been a consultant to a variety of companies, with emphasis on computing and communications technologies. He has served on the Board of Directors of four companies and on the Technical Advisory Boards of two others. In 2000 he co-founded an angel investment group that concentrates on business opportunities in the Midwest.

Among other projects led by Landweber were one of the first Internet protocol implementations (1981-84, IBM VM systems), the first publicly available OSI protocol implementation (1984-87 - UNIX), and implementation of the OSI network management protocol and its secure version (UNIX).