Glenn Ricart

Glenn Ricart has led a career that serves multiple academic fields:

- a decade at the National Institutes of Health using computing and networking to support protein structure analysis and other medical topics; taught medical computing for doctors doing their residencies at the NIH; chaired multiple study sections.

- entrepreneur with five startups and more than a dozen patents; the largest startup had 125 employees

- author or co-author of several multi-million-dollar NSF grants in advanced networking and wireless technologies

- Program Manager for DARPA for computer system security and other highly-classified topics

- taught Computer Science at U. Maryland (10 years) with emphasis on computing systems and networking

- general chair for NSF midscale experimental research facilities annual meetings

- Managing Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers for its Center of Advanced Research and multiple patents related to finding fraud in datasets and other tools for auditors

- Pioneer Member, Internet Hall of Fame, for first Internet interconnection point

- Faculty advisor for U. of Utah capstone engineering project classes

- President and CEO of National LambdaRail (NLR); at the time, the largest and fastest fiber optic network in the US

Contact: gricart@gmail.com

Website: www.linkedin.com/in/gricart

Abstracts

How Will Quantum Computing and networking Change Our World - an Interactive Discussion

Not only can bits be "0" or "1," they can have quantum properties that encode probabilities and possibilities. Even though entangled quantum bits (qbits) can instantaneously change state even while separated by thousands of miles, information itself still cannot exceed the speed of light. This leads to interesting possibilities and limitations. At the same time, because quantum is a different mode of use on fiber optic networks than traditional laser pulses, quantum networking can be added to or superimposed on existing fiber optic cables to increase their capacity since neither interferes with each other.

Due to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, there is about to be a renaissance in fiber deployment in the United States because new deployments can take immediate 100% depreciation charges against taxes in the year of deployment. Given the high capacity of fiber for both traditional optical phase encoding and the new ability for qbit transmission, we expect to see a renaissance in low-cost and high capacity digital networking in the United States. What are the likely impacts and what additional research is needed?

Why is Computer Security So Difficult and What Can You Do About it?

Every week there are dozens of computer break-ins and demands for ransom from international hackers. This talk approaches  the subject from two viewpoints: (A) traditional methods advocated by organizations like the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency/ The talk includes some examples of significant data breeches and what went wrong. In addition, emphasis will be placed on CISA's Cybersecurity Best Practices. We'll also talk about the proposals being made to the National Bureau of Standards to help discourage attacks and data loss. The second viewpoint (B) is a discussion of a current attempt by Computer Scientists to address the issues that result in cybersecurity breeches through the use of radical compartmentalization. While isolation to virtual machines and virtual networks help reduce the contagion of computer attacks and breeches, there is agreement we also need containment at radically small scales. Dr.Ricart serves on the Steering Committee for ORCA - a new attempt to reconceptualize radical containment architectures that will reduce the attack surfaces used by malevolent hackers. This talk will suggest what you can do now and in the future to provide better containment of misbehaving or injected malevolent code.

The Improbable Internet

How did a small Department Defense attempt to create outage-resistent networks end up underlying how we communicate with businesses, schools, organizations, and each other?  It wasn't originally planned to do this. One of the important answers is the breadth of interconnection using a few common protocols that enabled a whole host of unlikely partners to switch from vendor-specific networking protocols to a "no one owns it" Internet. Why did the National Science Foundation hire the leaders of the US Internet from overseas countries? Why did IBM's research division bet against its own sales team? How did one faculty member and two students become responsible for operating a national research network for the National Science Foundation? How did a hotel ice sculpture save a technology demo that resulted in an order of magnitude speed upgrade for the Internet? Why did one have to call Glenn Ricart on the telephone if you wanted to connect to the Internet during a crucial period of 18 months? Why was it more important to ask forgiveness than permission when connecting to the early Internet? How did the US Department of Defense end up being a crucial supporter of the commercial Internet?