Dr. Danny Cohen

Born in Israel, he is well known for coining the computer terms Big Endian and Little Endian in his landmark article, ?On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace,? which examines the proper byte order and adopted the terminology of endianness for computing. He developed the first real-time visual flight simulator on a general purpose computer in 1967. He also developed the first real-time radar simulator. His flight simulator work led to the development of the Cohen-Sutherland computer graphics line clipping algorithms, created with Ivan Sutherland. He earned his BSc at the Technion and his PhD at Harvard University. His thesis was titled: "Incremental Methods for Computer Graphics". He also spent two years as a graduate student in the math department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 1965-1967. After serving on the Computer Science faculty at Harvard University (1969?1973) and Caltech (California Institute of Technology) in 1976, he 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. He worked at USC/ISI (1973?1993), where he started many network related projects. In 1973, he was the first to implement ?packet-video? and ?packet voice? (Network Voice Protocol) when he adapted the visual flight simulator to run over the ARPANET. It was the first application of packet switching to real-time applications. He started the MOSIS project in 1980. He also started the FastXchange project (E-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, he co-founded Myricom (with Chuck Seitz, et al.) which commercialized Myrinet. Since 1991, he has been a Distinguished Engineer for Sun Microsystems working on very fast communication over short distances, using optical and electrical signaling, in Sun's CTO (Chief Technical Officer) organization. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2006) and an IEEE Fellow (2010). In 1993 he received a USAF (United States Air Force) Meritorious Civilian Service Award. In 2012, Cohen was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society. He 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. Among the many publications he has authored or co-authored are: "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace". Internet Experiment Note 137 (1980-04-01), Retrieved 2010-01-17 ? also published in IEEE Computer, October 1981 issue; With J. Finnegan, "AI as the Ultimate Enhancer of Protocol design" - 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; With Y. Yemini, "Protocols for Dating Coordination" - Proceedings of the Fourth Berkeley Conference on Distributed Data Management and Computer Networks, San Francisco, CA, August 1979, pp.179?188; "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; and With N. Gershenfeld "Internet-0: Interdevice Internetworking", IEEE Circuits and Devices Magazine, September/October 2006, Vol:22, Issue:5, pp. 48?55.