Name: Leonard Kleinrock
Title: Professor of Computer Science
Company: University of California, Los Angeles
Contact: www.lk.cs.ucla.edu
How I arrived at my present job (academic and other influences): After receiving my PhD in EE from MIT in 1963, I was offered a faculty position at UCLA and I decided "to try it". I loved it and the rest is history. My main influence as inventor of the internet technology came about from the research I did for my PhD which was to uncover the underlying principles of packet switching in the period from 1959 to 1962. As a result of that work, UCLA was chosen to be the first node on the internet and that occured in September 1969. Recently I formed Nomadix Inc., an internet startup in addition to my research at UCLA.
How I organize my day: I spend MWF at Nomadix and T, TH at UCLA when I am in town. My assistant at UCLA schedules my appointments there. I spend my evenings reading email and working on papers and research.
Amount of time spent working daily (at home and office): Office = 10 hours/day, home doing work = 4 hours/day. Exercise = 1 or 2 hours/day, time with my wife and our social and business friends = 3 hours/day, sleep approximately 5 hours/night.
What I do to get myself thinking creatively: In the quiet of my home working alone. Also in my working with my PhD students at UCLA and addressing and solving problems specific to their research.
My problem-solving strategy: Let the problem sit with me for a period of days, perhaps, then create a model of the problem, establish the bounds of the solution in some cases, then diving into the detailed model. Judge the sanity of the results against known behavior and results and existing systems.
What I do to relieve stress: Exercise, mainly Japanese Karate.
My hero, mentor, or person I most admire and why: Claude Shannon, the man who developed information theory. His mind was extremely sharp and he could see the physics of the problem, understand roughly what the solution had to be, and then apply the mathematical steps to prove it.
What I do to mentor those who work for me: As a professor, my career has been devoted to mentoring students in the classroom and in my office.
How a negative event changed my life in a positive way: I was extremely poor as a youth and as a result when I experimented with electronics, I had precious few instruments, tools, or parts. So I had to be extremely creative indesigning and building electronic devices (maily radios). I attended evening session for my bachelors degree in electrical engineering at CCNY and worked full time in the days as a technician and engineer, thereby learning an enormous amount about real world engineering problems.
One event or decision in my life I wish I could go back and change: Spend more time with my children when they were young.
What values are the most important to me and what I value in others: Honesty, integrity, cooperation, and most of all, hard work and sticking to a problem until it is solved. No quitting.
What inspires, motivates, or gets me excited about my job on a daily basis: Having impact as did my work on the internet technology as well as the impact of having produced a large body of published research and over 40 outstanding PhD students. At present, the challenge is to grow my company into a world class company that produces products that make a difference.
Biography: Dr. Leonard Kleinrock is known as the Inventor of the Internet Technology, having created the basic principles of packet switching, the technology underpinning the Internet, while a graduate student at MIT. This was a decade before the birth of the Internet which occurred when his Host computer at UCLA became the first node of the Internet in September 1969. He wrote the first paper and published the first book on the subject; he also directed the transmission of the first message ever to pass over the Internet.
Dr. Kleinrock received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1963 and has served as a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles since then. He received his BEE degree from CCNY in 1957 (and an Honorary Doctor of Science from CCNY in 1997). He is a co-founder of Linkabit. He is also Founder and Chairman of Nomadix, Inc and of Technology Transfer Institute, both hi-tech firms located in Santa Monica, CA. He has published more than 200 papers and authored six books on a wide array of subjects including packet switching networks, packet radio networks, local area networks, broadband networks and gigabit networks. Additionally, Dr. Kleinrock has recently launched the field of nomadic computing, the emerging technology to support users as soon as they leave their desktop environments; nomadic computing may well be the next major wave of the Internet.
Dr. Kleinrock is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an IEEE fellow and a founding member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. Among his many honors, he is the recipient of the C.C.N.Y. Townsend Harris Medal, the CCNY Electrical Engineering Award, the Marconi Award, the L.M. Ericsson Prize, the UCLA Outstanding Teacher Award, the Lanchester Prize, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the Sigma Xi Monie Ferst Award, and the IEEE Harry Goode Award.
He first became interested in electronics while reading a comic book at the age of six. The centerfold described how to build a crystal radio. He managed to collect the parts, make it work, and was amazed to hear music from this simple device; thus was an engineer born. The rest is history.
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Location: www.acm.org/crossroads/dayinlife/bios/leonard_kleinrock.html