Danny Cohen (engineer)
Encyclopedia
Danny Cohen is a member of the National Academy of Engineering
(2006) and an
IEEE Fellow
(2010). In 1993 Cohen received a USAF (United States Air Force
) Meritorious Civilian Service Award
.
In 1967, he developed the first real-time visual flight simulator on a
general purpose computer and also developed the first real-time radar
simulator. In 1981, he adapted the visual simulator to run over the
ARPANet
(the forerunner to the Internet
) which was the first
application of packet switching networks to real-time applications.
Starting in 1973, Cohen led several projects on real-time interactive
applications over the ARPANet
and the Internet
, such as packet-voice
(also known as Voice over Internet Protocol) and packet-video.
In 1967, flight simulation work by Cohen led to the development of the Cohen-Sutherland
computer graphics line clipping
algorithms, created with Ivan Sutherland
.
After serving on the computer science faculty at Harvard University
(1969–1973) and Caltech
(California Institute of Technology
) in 1976, Cohen joined USC/ISI (University of Southern California
/Information Sciences Institute
)
to work on a project designed to allow interactive, real-time speech over the ARPANet
.
Cohen worked at USC/ISI (1973–1993), where he started many network related projects, including
Packet-Voice, Packet-Video, and Internet Concepts. He started the MOSIS
project in
1980. Cohen also started the FastXchange
project (Electronic commerce
), Digital Library, and ATOMIC which was the forerunner of Myrinet
, a high-performance system area network. In 1993, he worked on Distributed Interactive Simulation
through several projects funded by
DoD (United States Department of Defense
). In 1994, Danny co-founded Myricom (with Chuck
Seitz, et al.) which commercialized Myrinet.
Cohen served on several panels and boards for DoD,
NIH (National Institutes of Health
), and NRC (United States National Research Council
),
including 5 years on the USAF Scientific Advisory Board
. He served as both a factual and expert witness
in several patent infringement legal cases about VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). Cohen is a commercial pilot
with SEL/MEL/SES and Instrument ratings.
Cohen is probably best known for his 1980 paper "On Holy Wars and a Plea for
Peace"
which adopted the terminology of endianness
for computing.
(Technion – Israel Institute of Technology) in 1963 and a PhD
from Ivan Sutherland
at Harvard in 1969. His thesis was titled:
"Incremental Methods for Computer Graphics".
Danny has served on the computer science faculty at Harvard, Technion, and Caltech.
He also spent two years as a graduate student in the math department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), 1965-1967.
Sun Microsystems
working on very fast communication over short distances, using optical and electrical signaling, in
Sun's CTO (Chief technical officer
) organization.
Danny is also an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at USC.
National Academy of Engineering
The National Academy of Engineering is a government-created non-profit institution in the United States, that was founded in 1964 under the same congressional act that led to the founding of the National Academy of Sciences...
(2006) and an
IEEE Fellow
IEEE Fellow
An IEEE member is elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow for "unusual distinction in the profession and shall be conferred by the Board of Directors upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest"...
(2010). In 1993 Cohen received a USAF (United States Air Force
United States Air Force
The United States Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the American uniformed services. Initially part of the United States Army, the USAF was formed as a separate branch of the military on September 18, 1947 under the National Security Act of...
) Meritorious Civilian Service Award
Meritorious Civilian Service Award
The Meritorious Civilian Service Award is commonly the second highest award and medal provided to civilian employees within agencies of the federal government of the United States...
.
In 1967, he developed the first real-time visual flight simulator on a
general purpose computer and also developed the first real-time radar
simulator. In 1981, he adapted the visual simulator to run over the
ARPANet
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network , was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet...
(the forerunner to the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
) which was the first
application of packet switching networks to real-time applications.
Starting in 1973, Cohen led several projects on real-time interactive
applications over the ARPANet
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network , was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet...
and the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, such as packet-voice
(also known as Voice over Internet Protocol) and packet-video.
In 1967, flight simulation work by Cohen led to the development of the Cohen-Sutherland
Cohen-Sutherland
In computer graphics, the Cohen–Sutherland algorithm is a line clipping algorithm. The algorithm divides a 2D space into 9 regions, of which only the middle part is visible....
computer graphics line clipping
Line clipping
In computer graphics, line clipping is the process of removing lines or portions of lines outside of an area of interest. Typically, any line or part thereof which is outside of the viewing area is removed....
algorithms, created with Ivan Sutherland
Ivan Sutherland
Ivan Edward Sutherland is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal...
.
After serving on the computer science faculty at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
(1969–1973) and Caltech
(California Institute of Technology
California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering...
) in 1976, Cohen joined USC/ISI (University of Southern California
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
/Information Sciences Institute
Information Sciences Institute
The Information Sciences Institute is a research and development unit of the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering which focuses on computer and communications technology and information processing...
)
to work on a project designed to allow interactive, real-time speech over the ARPANet
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network , was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet...
.
Cohen worked at USC/ISI (1973–1993), where he started many network related projects, including
Packet-Voice, Packet-Video, and Internet Concepts. He started the MOSIS
MOSIS
MOSIS is probably the oldest integrated circuit foundry service and one of the first Internet services other than supercomputing services and basic infrastructure such as E-mail or FTP....
project in
1980. Cohen also started the FastXchange
project (Electronic commerce
Electronic commerce
Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, eCommerce or e-comm, refers to the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. However, the term may refer to more than just buying and selling products online...
), Digital Library, and ATOMIC which was the forerunner of Myrinet
Myrinet
Myrinet, ANSI/VITA 26-1998, is a high-speed local area networking system designed by Myricom to be used as an interconnect between multiple machines to form computer clusters. Myrinet has much lower protocol overhead than standards such as Ethernet, and therefore provides better throughput, less...
, a high-performance system area network. In 1993, he worked on Distributed Interactive Simulation
Distributed Interactive Simulation
Distributed Interactive Simulation is an IEEE standard for conducting real-time platform-level wargaming across multiple host computers and is used worldwide, especially by military organizations but also by other agencies such as those involved in space exploration and medicine.-History:The...
through several projects funded by
DoD (United States Department of Defense
United States Department of Defense
The United States Department of Defense is the U.S...
). In 1994, Danny co-founded Myricom (with Chuck
Seitz, et al.) which commercialized Myrinet.
Cohen served on several panels and boards for DoD,
NIH (National Institutes of Health
National Institutes of Health
The National Institutes of Health are an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and are the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research. Its science and engineering counterpart is the National Science Foundation...
), and NRC (United States National Research Council
United States National Research Council
The National Research Council of the USA is the working arm of the United States National Academies, carrying out most of the studies done in their names.The National Academies include:* National Academy of Sciences...
),
including 5 years on the USAF Scientific Advisory Board
USAF Scientific Advisory Board
The United States Air Force Scientific Advisory Board is a military unit that provides forecasts of long-range science and technology.-Chronology:...
. He served as both a factual and expert witness
in several patent infringement legal cases about VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). Cohen is a commercial pilot
with SEL/MEL/SES and Instrument ratings.
Cohen is probably best known for his 1980 paper "On Holy Wars and a Plea for
Peace"
which adopted the terminology of endianness
Endianness
In computing, the term endian or endianness refers to the ordering of individually addressable sub-components within the representation of a larger data item as stored in external memory . Each sub-component in the representation has a unique degree of significance, like the place value of digits...
for computing.
Education and early work
Danny earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics at the Technion(Technion – Israel Institute of Technology) in 1963 and a PhD
from Ivan Sutherland
Ivan Sutherland
Ivan Edward Sutherland is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal...
at Harvard in 1969. His thesis was titled:
"Incremental Methods for Computer Graphics".
Danny has served on the computer science faculty at Harvard, Technion, and Caltech.
He also spent two years as a graduate student in the math department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
(MIT), 1965-1967.
Current work
Since 1991 Danny Cohen has been a Distinguished Engineer forSun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
working on very fast communication over short distances, using optical and electrical signaling, in
Sun's CTO (Chief technical officer
Chief technical officer
A chief technology officer is an executive-level position in a company or other entity whose occupant is focused on scientific and technological issues within an organization....
) organization.
Danny is also an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at USC.
Selected publications
— also published in IEEE Computer, October 1981 issue.- "AI as the Ultimate Enhancer of Protocol design" (with J. Finnegan), Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering, Ed. Derek Partridge, ABLEX Publishing Corporation, Norwood, NJ. ISBN 0-89391-606-4, 1991, Chapter 22, pp. 463–472, and also in the Proceedings of the Third Annual Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Computer Technology Conference, Long Beach, CA, April 1987, pp. 329–337. Available online at http://www.priorartdatabase.com/IPCOM/000128679/.
- "Protocols for Dating Coordination" (with Y. Yemini), Proceedings of the Fourth Berkeley Conference on Distributed Data Management and Computer Networks, San Francisco, CA, August 1979, pp. 179–188.
- "Incremental Methods for Computer Graphics" (PhD Thesis), Harvard Report ESD-TR-69-193, April 1969. Available from DTIC (AD #AD694550/U).
- "On Linear Differences Curves", published as a chapter in the book Advanced Computer Graphics, Economics, Techniques and Applications, edited by Parslow and Green, Pleunum Press, London 1971, and also in Proceedings of the Computer Graphics '70 Conference, Brunel University, England, April 1970.
- "RFC 0741: Specifications for the Network Voice Protocol (NVP)", Nov-22-1977.
- "A VLSI Approach to Computational Complexity" by Professor J. Finnegan, in VLSI, Systems and Computation, edited by H. T. Kung, Bob SproullBob SproullDr Robert F. Sproull is an American computer scientist, who works for Oracle Corporation where he is director of Oracle Labs in Burlington, Massachusetts .- Biography :...
, and Guy L. Steele, Jr.Guy L. Steele, Jr.Guy Lewis Steele Jr. , also known as "The Great Quux", and GLS , is an American computer scientist who has played an important role in designing and documenting several computer programming languages.-Biography:...
, Computer Science Press, 1981, pp. 124–125. - "A Voice Message System", in Computer Message Systems edited by R. P. Uhlig, North-Holland 1981, pp. 17–28.
- "The ISO Reference Model and Other Protocol Architectures" (with J. B. Postel), in International Federation for Information ProcessingInternational Federation for Information ProcessingThe International Federation for Information Processing is an umbrella organization for national societies working in the field of information technology. It is a non-governmental, non-profit organization with offices in Laxenburg, Austria...
1983, Paris, September 1983, pp. 29–34. - "MOSIS: Present and Future" (with G. Lewicki, P. Losleben, and D. Trotter) 1984 Conference on Advanced Research in VLSI, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
, January 1984, pp. 124–128. - "A Mathematical Approach to Computational Network Design", Chapter 1 in Systolic Signal Processing Systems (E. E. Swartzlander, ed.), Marcel Dekker, 1987, pp. 1–29.
- "Computerized Commerce", International Federation for Information ProcessingInternational Federation for Information ProcessingThe International Federation for Information Processing is an umbrella organization for national societies working in the field of information technology. It is a non-governmental, non-profit organization with offices in Laxenburg, Austria...
1989, San Francisco, August 1989, pp. 1095–1100. - “Myrinet: A Gigabit-per-Second Local Area Network” (with Boden, Felderman, Kulawik, Seitz, Seizovic, and Su), IEEE-MICRO, February 1995, pp. 29–36.
- “RFC 1807: A Format for Bibliographic Records” (with R. Lasher), IETF, June 1995.
- “The Internet of Things” (with N. Gershenfeld and R. Krikorian), Scientific American, October 2004, pp. 76–81.
- "Internet-0: Interdevice Internetworking" (with N. Gershenfeld), IEEE Circuits and Devices Magazine, September/October 2006, Vol:22, Issue:5, pp. 48–55
Patents
- US Patent 7,573,720 (2009) Active socket for facilitating proximity communication
- US Patent 7,561,584 (2009) Implementation of a graph property in a switching fabric for fast networking
- US Patent 7,525,199 (2009) Packaging for proximity communication positioned integrated circuits
- US Patent 7,460,035 (2008) Balanced code with opportunistically reduced transitions
- US Patent 3,769,442 (1973) Compressed Data Base for Radar Land Mass Simulator
External links
- "TIME's Best Inventions of 2008, 30. The Internet Of Things" TIME Magazine
- "Homage to Beck Subway and Metro Maps" blog by Katy Dickinson 6 Sep 2008
- "Sun Microsystems Bolsters Top Technical Roster and Recognizes New Member of the National Academy of Engineering" 2006
- "Smart Computing Reference Series", Encyclopedia May 2002, Volume 6, Issue 5
- "Danny Cohen", Sun MicrosystemsSun MicrosystemsSun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
biography in "The People at CTO"