Keynote Speaker

We are pleased to announce that the keynote address at ProComm 2016 will be delivered by Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com, and now Professor of Innovation at our host school, the University of Texas at Austin.

Robert Metcalfe created Ethernet in 1973 after trying to create a way to connect several computers to one printer for the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Today, ethernet is the most widely installed LAN protocol.

Metcalfe has a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT and a B.S. degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He received an M.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 1970 and, in 1973, a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard for research done at MIT’s Project Mac. Among many other awards, he received the 1980 Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the 1988 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal. In 1996, he was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor “For exemplary and sustained leadership in the development, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet.”

His publications include the often cited “Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks,” with David Boggs (Communications of the ACM, July 1976) and “Local Networks of Personal Computers” at the Ninth World Computer Congress, Paris, 1983. He has served on the Executive Office of the President’s Advisory Committee on Information Networks, the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Technology Board, and as Chair of the Corporation for Open Systems, promoting worldwide computer and telephone networking standards.

At UT-Austin, Bob founded and directs the Innovation Center, which brings key players together in fostering “an entrepreneurial ecology” that can help “propel start-ups into world markets.”