CONGRATULATIONS TO RADIA PERLMAN!

The Silicon Valley Intellectual Property Law Association (SVIPLA) has selected Radia Perlman, DE, Sun Labs, to receive their Inventor of the Year Award, based on her considerable intellectual contributions to the fields of network security and routing technologies. (See SVIPLA Press Release below.)

Radia will be honored at a dinner on June 24, 2004, at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. Radia will be speaking and if you would like to attend, please follow registration instructions at the end of this message.

The SVIPLA is a professional association of members who focus their practice on intellectual property matters including patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, licensing, litigation and other related fields.

The SVIPLA has monthly meetings to discuss topics relevant to intellectual property law. Membership is open to anyone who is interested in intellectual property law.

INVENTOR OF THE YEAR
Radia Perlman, Distinguished Engineer, Sun Microsystems Laboratories

Each year SVIPLA awards the Inventor of the Year based upon contributions to the technical arts. Through the nomination process, Ms. Perlman was selected by her peers to receive this award. At Sun for 6 years, she conducts research on network security and routing technologies. She holds 70 patents with others pending, has published in numerous publications and was named as one of the 20 most influential people in information technology by Data Communications Magazine in its 20th and 25th anniversary editions.

Dr. Perlman's work in routing protocols has had a profound impact on the Internet. Her spanning tree algorithm is used by all bridges and switches, and her contributions to routing protocols make the routing protocols in the Internet today scalable and robust. In security, she has made contributions to sabotage-proof routing, PKI models, and certificate revocation.

She also launched "tangible computing" in the early 1970's. This process involved making the concepts of programming comprehensible (even to preschool children) by using physical objects for commands and then being able to plug them together to create programs. Even though it was intended for human use, MIT researchers, having rediscovered this work, are conducting experiments to see if this system can be used to teach parrots to program. She is author of "Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols" and co-author of "Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World", both textbooks used in many universities and popular as reference books to engineers. She has a PhD from MIT, and an honorary doctorate from KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.