Srinivasan Seshan on the past, present and future of the internet

At a CMU-Q Distinguished Lecture, Srinivasan Seshan described how delivering multimedia content has been the driving force behind many internet changes over the past several decades. Seshan is the head of Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Science Department and the Joseph F. Traub Professor of Computer Science.

During his talk, Seshan outlined how internet users 30 years ago were primarily educators and researchers who would log into a supercomputer or mainframe, transfer files, and then log off. At the dawn of the web in the early 1990s, the internet moved from being an educational venture to a commercial one. Sharing video over the internet required rethinking how data is delivered. This question has driven much of the research and development of the internet, and will continue to shape the internet infrastructure of the future.

Seshan’s primary research interests have been in the areas of network protocols, mobile computing, and distributed network applications. His current work explores the challenges and opportunities related to new networking architectures, network security and internet fairness.

Distinguished Lectures at CMU-Q provide a glimpse into the depth and breadth of scholarship of the many experts who visit the Qatar campus. Seshan’s talk was an A. Nico Habermann Distinguished Lecture in Computer Science, named in honor of the head of the Computer Science Department at CMU from 1980 to 1988 and founding dean of the School of Computing Science.