Dr. John C. Klensin

A computer science professional who is active in Internet-related issues, his career includes 30 years as a Principal Research Scientist at MIT, a stint as INFOODS Project Coordinator for the United Nations University, Distinguished Engineering Fellow at MCI WorldCom, and Internet Architecture Vice President at AT&T; he is now an independent consultant. His involvement with Internet protocols began in 1969, when he worked on the File Transfer Protocol. In 1992, he and Randy Bush created the Network Startup Resource Center, helping dozens of countries to establish connections with FidoNet, UseNet, and when possible the Internet. He has also participated in, and sometimes led, industry consortia, scientific, and quasi-governmental efforts that resulted in de facto standards. For example, he was a member of the Advisory Council and of the first ad hoc committees on procedures of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). He served on the Internet Architecture Board from 1996-2002 and was its Chair from 2000 until the end of his term. Earlier, he served as IETF Area Director for Applications and was Chair, Co-chair, and/or Editor for IETF Working Groups focused on messaging and IETF process issues. He was involved in the early procedural and definitional work for DNS administration and top-level domain definitions and was part of the committee that worked out the transition of DNS-related responsibilities between USC-ISI and what became ICANN. His primary work has focused on technical and design efforts, both as research and in product development and support. For example, industrially, he was the lead designer for several user-visible aspects of InternetMCI, designed database and data analysis systems used by several large international corporations and governmental units (including the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the US and the Department of Social Justice in The Netherlands) in the 1970s and 1980s. These major contributions went to manage inventories, planning, and human resource models for two of the world's largest automobile manufacturers and one oil company and for several activities of the US Department of Defense including fuel supply availability planning during the oil crisis of the mid-1970s and the development and management of the DOD budget itself. He was also founding co-principal investigator of the Network Start-up Resource Center project, which provides technical assistance for creation of computer network connections to developing areas and continues as a senior advisor to that activity. He has served as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Applications Area Director 1993-1995, Internet Architecture Board member 1996-2002, and IAB chair 2000-2002. In March 2009 he began another term on the IAB ending in 2011. He has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Science Education and Technology and the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis. In 2003 he received an INCITS Merit Award. In 2008, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2012, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society. He is the author or co-editor of over 40 RFCs, covering SMTP (RFC 4409 and RFC 5321 among others), IDNA (RFC 5890 and RFC 6055 among others), Unicode (RFC 5137 and RFC 5198 among others), and other fields such as CRAM-MD5 (RFC 2195) or IETF policies (RFC 3933). In March 2011 8BITMIME (RFC 6152) was published as Internet standard STD 71, in November 2011 Mail submission (RFC 6409) was published as STD 72. His i18n work also included an April Fools' Day RFC in collaboration with Harald Alvestrand (RFC 5242) and MIME in collaboration with Ned Freed (RFC 4289 among others). He is working on several Internet drafts. As of 2011 he is one of the two co-chairs for the IETF EAI working group, and a member of the RFC Independent Submissions Editorial Board.