Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology Honors Sun Labs' Radia Perlman

Radia Perlman

The Swedish Royal Institute of Technology has granted an honorary doctoral degree to Sun distinguished engineer Radia Perlman in recognition of her contributions to data networking, communications and security technologies. Of this year's four recipients of the Institute's honorary doctorates, Perlman was the only computer scientist. She will receive the doctorate November 10 in a ceremony in Stockholm.

Perlman currently works at Sun Labs Massachusetts doing research on network security and routing technologies. In her career, Perlman designed the spanning tree algorithm used by bridges and switches, and the underlying technology that makes modern routing protocols robust and scalable, as well as a sabotage-resistant routing protocol designed to withstand attacks on the infrastructure involving compromise of trusted routers. Perlman is also the author of two widely used text books, "Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World", and "Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols." She holds 47 patents, has published prolifically in her field and was named as one of the 20 most influential people in information technology by Data Communications magazine in both its 20th and 25th anniversary editions.

Perlman is also known for having launched the field of "tangible computing". Tangible computing involves making the concepts of programming comprehensible to even preschool children by using physical objects for commands, and being able to plug them together to create programs. Although primarily intended for human use, a visiting researcher at MIT has announced experiments to see if tangible computing can be used to teach parrots to program.

In addition to her many technical accomplishments, Perlman is known for her clear explanations and her sense of humor, evident in both her textbooks and presentations. For instance, her network security book starts with the line, "It was a dark and stormy night," and the dedication to the book, "SI SPY NET WORK, BIG FEDJAW IOG LINK KYXOGY", is a cryptogram that solves to the phrase "To the bad guys, for making our jobs secure."