科学美国人60秒:The Internet Needs a Tune-Up

“So, the internet is really a network of networks that underlies critically so many things in our lives. But really 50 years ago it was an experiment that escaped from the lab. And it wasn’t really designed to be the global communications infrastructure it is today.”

Jennifer Rexford, a computer scientist at Princeton University specializing in computer networks. She spoke to Scientific American Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos.

“So, it really planted the seeds of tremendous innovation around the periphery of the internet and the devices we connect to it and the applications we run over it. But ironically it didn’t plant the seeds of its own innovation. And we suffer from that every day, from the fact that we have denial-of-service attacks taking down websites, we have performance problems, Netflix streams grinding to a halt and so on.

“In my work on self-driving networks we’re bringing together two really exciting technologies: machine learning that’s transforming everything, by taking raw data into true situational awareness. And the second is programmable network switches that bring the same idea of enabling and lowering the barrier to innovation that we have at the outside of the internet to its basic underpinnings. So that we can learn how to sense and actuate better over time, so that the network can learn to detect performance problems and route around them. To detect denial-of-service attacks and block them before they do significant harm. So, the marriage of these two technologies is really happening now, and it’s a great opportunity to build an internet that actually is worthy of the trust that we increasingly place in it today.”

—Steve Mirsky