Dan Reed Talks About the Internet
October 15, 2020
Remember when a friend was someone you regularly met in person? When SPAM was just a food product? When fishing was done with the pole? When a party line wasn’t something you said at a social event? The internet has brought huge changes in how our social interactions occur, information (and disinformation) is shared, and business is conducted.
Dan A. Reed, the U’s senior vice president for academic affairs, discusses how the internet was created, introduces some of the colorful characters who helped create it, and reflects on some of the social, technical, and economic challenges ahead. Click the video below to see his talk to the University of Utah’s Alumni Association about this fascinating subject.
Reed is the senior vice president for academic affairs at the University of Utah. Previously, he was vice president for research and economic development, chair in computational science and bioinformatics, and professor of computer science at the University of Iowa. He also served as Microsoft’s corporate vice president for technology policy and extreme computing, where he helped shape Microsoft’s long-term vision for technology innovations in cloud computing and the company’s policy engagement with governments and institutions worldwide.
Before joining Microsoft, he was the founding director of the renaissance computing institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also served as chancellor’s eminent professor and vice chancellor for information technology. Prior to that, he was Gutgsell professor and head of the department of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.