Vint Cerf, Vice-President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google

Tuesday, March 4, 2014 18:00
Amphi 15, Sorbonne University - Faculté des Sciences

On the Preservation of Digital Information

Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. He has served in executive positions at ICANN, the Internet Society, MCI, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He is President of the Association for Computing Machinery and is a member of the National Science Board.
Cerf is a recipient of numerous awards for his work, including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, US National Medal of Technology, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the Prince of Asturias Award, the Tunisian National Medal of Science, the Japan Prize, the Charles Stark Draper award, the ACM Turing Award and 21 honorary degrees.

Saving bits is not enough. The meaning of the bits must also be preserved along with any meta-data needed for that interpretation. Software that created the bits, interprets and renders the bits and perhaps the operating system needed to run the application and a description of the computer needed to run the software may all need to be preserved. There are intellectual property issues also to be dealt with as companies come and go, software ownership changes, and so on. This is a complex problem especially when the target is preservation for millennia.

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