The Marconi Society announced that Dr. Frank Thomson “Tom” Leighton will be the recipient of 2018 Marconi Prize that will be presented on October 2nd. Co-founder of Akamai Technologies and developer of internet algorithms used to deliver trillions of content requests, Dr. Leighton’s technology innovation ended the “World Wide Wait” that addressed the challenge of content congestion on the World Wide Web.
The Marconi Prize is a $100K annual award recognizing individuals who have made a significant contribution to the advancement of communications with emphasis on the benefits to mankind achieve through scientific or technological discoveries
Leighton’s success came by solving a 1995 challenge made by World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee, who foresaw internet congestion as a critical issue for the growth of the internet. He opened the challenge to MIT colleagues to invent a new way to deliver content. Leighton, then the head of the Theoretical Computer Science group, worked with Danny Lewin and other bright minds to develop distributed computing algorithms that solved the problem.
In order to convince carriers and content providers that the technology would work at scale, Leighton and Lewin incorporated Akamai in 1998. From there the company grew, accelerating trillions of Internet requests, protecting mobile and web assets from DDoS and targeted application attacks, and enabling Internet users to seamlessly and securely browse no matter how they connect.
“Going from a clever set of algorithmic ideas to the world’s largest distributed computing platform and a hugely successful company involved a truly amazing combination of skills and vision,” said Dr. Jennifer Rexford, Chair of Princeton’s Department of Computer Science.“Tom has been responsible for Akamai’s technology vision for going on twenty years, through a period of tremendous growth (of both Akamai’s infrastructure and the Internet as a whole), technological advances, new applications, and diverse threats.”
By receiving the Marconi Prize, Dr. Leighton joins a distinguished group of scientists with outstanding achievements in modern communication technology, from wireless breakthroughs to microprocessors.
