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Laureate 2010
Biography of Mr Robert E. Kahn, President and CEO of CNRI
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 Robert E. Kahn is Chairman, CEO and President of the Corporation for National
Research Initiatives (CNRI), which he founded in 1986 after a 13-year term at
the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). CNRI is a
not-for-profit organization for research and development of the National
Information Infrastructure.
Following a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from the City College of New York
in 1960, and MA and PhD degrees from Princeton University in 1962 and 1964
respectively, Dr Kahn worked at AT&T and Bell Laboratories before he became
Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT). He took a leave of absence from MIT to join Bolt Beranek and
Newman, where he was responsible for the system design of the Arpanet, the first
packet-switched network.
In 1972, Dr Kahn moved to DARPA and subsequently became Director of its
Information Processing Techniques Office. There he initiated the United States
government's Strategic Computing Program. Dr Kahn conceived the idea of
open-architecture networking. He is a co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol, and
was responsible for originating DARPA's Internet Program.
More recently, Dr Kahn has developed the concept of a digital object
architecture to provide a framework for interoperability of heterogeneous
information systems. He is also co-inventor of Knowbot programs, mobile software
agents in the network environment. Among his numerous awards, Dr Kahn received
the
Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005 and the National Medal of Technology
in 1997.
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