This week it was announced that MIT professor and CSAIL principal investigator Tom Leighton was selected to receive the 2018 Marconi Prize, the most prestigious honor in the field of communications technology.
He is being recognized for his “fundamental contributions to technology and the establishment of the content delivery network (CDN) industry.” Specifically, Leighton created the algorithms used to deliver trillions of content requests over the Internet every day.
Leighton and his graduate student, the late Danny Lewin, spun out their MIT work to form Akamai Technologies, the world’s largest cloud delivery platform, which by some estimates serves up to 30 percent of all of the world’s web traffic.
“Tom is not only one of the top computer scientists in the world, but also one of the top entrepreneurs and CEOs in the world.” says Ion Stoica, a professor in the EECS Department at University of California at Berkeley and the Director of the Real-time Intelligent Secure Execution Laboratory (RISE Lab), in a related press release. “Tom has no peers when it comes to bridging theory and practice, and his work has revolutionized the way we consume information over the Internet today.”
His work has had a groundbreaking impact in making the world more connected. His insights on delivering web content faster and more efficiently have played a key role in enabling us to share information and media online.
Past winners include Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, security researchers Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, and CSAIL’s Tim Berners-Lee.
The award will be given at The Marconi Society’s annual Awards Dinner in Bologna, Italy, on October 2nd.
