Name: David J. Farber
Titles: Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunication Systems, Professor of Business and Public Policy
Departments: Computer and Information Science Department, Electrical Engineering Department, Wharton School of Business
Institution: University of Pennsylvania
Contact Information: farber@cis.upenn.edu
Web site: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~farber/home.html
What I work on: My research tends to be in various ISP networks and security. Those are the dominant things but on the side I have a very strong interest in privacy and individual constitutional freedoms.
I teach several courses. I teach in telecommunications where we talk largely about current technology. My core course is Computer Ethics and Society. It's designed for undergraduates and is semi-technical but it looks at the issues behind the technology today. That's a fun course because you get people who think [about ethical issues].
My work with the EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation, a membership organization that defends digital civil liberties] is pro bono. I work with the ACM's privacy and security task force. I do some work with the executive board of the ACM. Some IEEE activities. I spent one-and-a-half years at the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] as their Chief Technologist. That was fun. [After I came back to Penn from the FCC,] my courses tended to be more relevant.
I also do a reasonable amount of advising to industry. I spend a lot of time traveling. I also spend a lot of time online with my contacts and my students. I tell my students they have access to me what sometimes seems like 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That kind of interaction style has changed the way we work.
How I arrived at my present job: When I graduated [from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ], I was ready to go to graduate school but was offered a job at Bell Labs and ended up there instead. I was at Bell Labs for twelve years and met my wife there. I then went to the Rand Corporation in California and was teaching on and off at the University of California in Irvine. A friend asked if I would like to teach at Irvine permanently. That got me into the academic world. I spent seven years at Irvine and eleven at [the University of] Delaware. Some of my best students came out of my stay at Delaware.
I ended up teaching at Penn [the University of Pennsylvania] after Delaware. Weird, coming up without a degree. I am one of the major academics without a [graduate] degree. I've been at Penn fifteen years. The path from industry to university has been much harder to take. I'm far from sure it's the best thing.
How I organize my day: I spend a lot of time on the computer. E-mail is my dominant form of communication. I wake up in the morning and read my e-mail for half an hour. I take my laptop on the commuter train, partly working on e-mail and reading archives.
I plug in my laptop at my desk and then go to meetings with faculty and friends. Most of [the meetings] deal with people around the university who want to come in and talk with students with brilliant ideas for new companies. Or people have been assigned new projects and want to know what it is really like in telecommunications. I go to academic meetings that belong to doctors and faculty meetings. My tolerance for formal meetings has gone down over the years.
I have my office telephone number transferred to my cell phone. I'm a person who doesn't like my office. I have my BlackBerry [wireless e-mail device] and my cell phone. For a large part of the day, my office is hanging from my belt. Throughout my years, I have never been able to sit in my office. The world has given me the ability to be completely portable. The office has no attraction to me except that the screen is bigger. I can meet people at Starbucks. The day is punctuated by endless interactions.
I was giving a talk in front of the board of trustees of the University and one of my deans introduced me as the virtual faculty member. I was always some place but he was never sure where but he knew he could always get me instantaneously.
Amount of time spent working daily (at home and office): I spend about ten, eleven hours a day on non-personal stuff. It's punctuated by times you can just relax.
What I do to get myself thinking creatively: I find my best creativity is taking a long walk with no particular place to go in mind. I let my mind go on the issues and try not to be so organized that I only go down established paths. For some reason, that tends to get me good insight. Another technique is to grab a person—a student—and start talking out loud as I think out the problem. Often some comment from the "wall" sets me down the right path and just as often a comment from the student is the right starter.
My problem-solving strategy: If I knew that, I could bottle it up! I thought about that for a long, long time and I've really never been able to tell people what it is. But I'm very good at doing it. I can forecast the future of computing, and I never miss. A lot of it is a long varied history in a number of fields: computer science, engineering, comm-centered. It's these variety of skills you pick up as you do every one of these things. You look at the problem you try to solve and pull out these miscellaneous theories. I've been through most of the field and a lot of these comm. problems you've seen before. No magic thing except a lot of experiences.
What I do to relieve stress: Drink too much coffee, read a lot. Mostly science fiction and history. I am a frustrated cosmologist; I read a lot of physics and cosmology. We go to the theatre. Sometimes when I travel, people find out I’m there, and that's the end of that vacation. For a while I was doing a lot of sailing. Reading is mostly what I do, not technical reading (outside the field). That switch between technology and policy keeps the pressure down. I always have a lot of irons in the fire. Too much is interesting out there.
My hero, mentor, or person that I admire and why: Most of them are no longer around now. The guy who was my biggest mentor was Dick [Richard] Hamming who is probably one of the best I had. Dick was a well-known mathematician at Bell Labs, and he helped me enormously in my youth. Paul Baran, who's still around, was of particular help. I liked [Richard] Feynman when he was still around. He had humor, and he had deep insight. He was a good hero.
What I do to mentor those who work with me: For graduate students, the thesis is a very important part of your career. It helps you learn to think. For junior faculty, I help them when they need help. Let them think their way out. Let them go off and stew. I help them find an idea that they are interested in.
I really don't like giving my graduate students pre-assigned tasks like "finish your thesis." With junior faculty they have to get involved in projects. If it's my name on a paper and it's a good paper, it's more likely it will get published than a young faculty. It's a very strange relationship, trying to get them to the point where they are better than you are.
How a negative event changed my life in a positive way: When I decided to take a risk like go off to the academic world. I don't look at those as negative events though.
One event or decision in my life I wish I could go back and change: The fact that my wife and I knew each other for nine years before we decided we liked each other.
What values are the most important to me and what I value in others: Intellectual honesty. Telling you what they really mean. Ethical behavior. People who understand that there are a lot of different types of people in the world and that it's ok to be different.
What inspires, motivates, or gets me excited about my job on a daily basis: It changes every day. Every four years at most, probably every year, there's a new crop of people coming in and an old crop leaving. Graduates and undergraduates come and talk to you about something—their ideas—and they keep you intellectually alive. It's the thing that makes the academic world worth it. In industry, I knew exactly what everybody would think. You knew what someone did. With kids, you see them grow intellectually with age. You graduate a PhD student. If you've done well with that student, that student swears he did it on his own. Five or six years later, he'll realize what you did and say thank you.
Biography: Prof. Farber is the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunication Systems holding appointments in the Computer and Information Science Department and in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition he holds appointments as a Professor of Business and Public Policy of the Wharton School of Business and as a Faculty Associate of the Annenberg School of Communications.
In January 17, 2000, he was appointed to be Chief Technologist at the US Federal Communications Commission while on leave from UPenn for one year ending in early January 2001.
At UPenn, he co-directs The Penn Initiative on Markets, Technology and Policy.
He also is Director of the Distributed Systems Laboratory (DSL) where he manages leading edge research in Ultra High Speed Networking. Research papers of the DSL are available in its electronic library (http://www.dsl.cis.upenn.edu/).
His early academic research work was focused at creating the worlds first operational Distributed Computer System -- DCS while at the ICS Department at the University of California at Irvine. After that, while with the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of Delaware, he helped conceive and organize CSNet, NSFNet and the NREN.
He graduated from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1956 and then started a eleven year career at Bell Laboratories where he helped design the first electronic switching system - the ESS as well as helping to design the programming language SNOBOL. He then went west to The Rand Corporation and to Scientific Data Systems prior to joining academia. At both Bell Labs and Rand, he had the privilege, at a young age, of working with and learning from giants in our field.
In 1999, he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology where he also serves as a Trustee of the Institute.
Prof. Farber is a Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- the EFF. He is a Visiting Professor of the Center for Global Communications of Japan -- Glocom of the International University of Japan, a Senior Fellow at ASIA NETWORK RESEARCH, a Member of the International Science Review Board of KDRL Singapore and a Member of the Advisory Boards of both the Center for Democracy and Technology and EPIC.
In the past, he was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society -- the ISOC
He served for 10 years of service on the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board -- CSTB. He served on the US Presidential Advisory Board on Information Technology prior to his assignment at the FCC. He currently is a Member of the FCC's Technological Advisory Council.
He is a Fellow of both the ACM and the IEEE and was the recipient of the 1995 ACM Sigcomm Award for lifelong contributions to the computer communications field. In 1997, he was awarded the prestigious John Scott Award for Contributions to Humanity.
He was named in the 1997 edition of the UPSIDE's Elite 100, as one of the Visionaries of the field and was named in the 1999 Network World as one of the 25 most powerful people in Networking and in 2001 one of the smartest 76 people in the Delaware Valley.
His industrial experiences are extensive. Just as he entered the academic world, he co-founded Caine, Farber & Gordon Inc. (CFG Inc.) which became one of the leading suppliers of software design methodology. He is also on a number of industrial advisory and management boards including the NTT DoCoMo, ATT Corporate, Boingo Wireless, Fastnet, Com21 and E-tenna among others.
Date of Interview: March 2, 2002
Last Modified:
Location: www.acm.org/crossroads/dayinlife/bios/david_j_farber.html