In recent years, I have not seen a single technical topic that has garnished so much attention and generated so much hype as the Internet-what it is, how it can be used, if it will survive, and who will control it-whatever IT turns out to be. It seems that everyone has a URL these days, but no one person has a perfect fix on the future of the Internet.

Hype aside, Stanford has been associated with this form of communication from its infancy-starting with the early work of Vint Cerf, "Father of the Internet," to the more recent permutations by the gang at Yahoo!, with varied technical and educational contributions along the way by people like Eric Benhamou and Jim Clark. Their stories are featured in the following pages, and their legacy continues to influence Stanford in both its basic research and its impact on the very way we teach.

The list of faculty at the School of Engineering working on projects that could be defined even narrowly as "Internet-related" is astounding in its number and breadth. From Anoop Gupta's research in video compression, to Mary Baker's work with wireless, to Nick McKeown's interest in routing and switch architectures, to Terry Winograd's and Hector Garcia-Molina's work on digital libraries, to Serge Plotkin's investigation of congestion in high-speed networks, the research is vibrant and robust. With all this activity, it is understandable that the Center for Telecommunications at Stanford drew participants from 120 companies and educational organizations around the world to its recent conference, "The Acceleration of Internet Multimedia Communications."

The School of Engineering is also exploring the pedagogical uses of the Internet. Many faculty now support active and highly interactive Web sites for their classes, including everything from straight-forward listing of assignments, to on-line discussion groups and help sessions. In addition, there are currently 15 Stanford Engineering courses designed for the World Wide Web by the Asynchronous Distance Education Project (ADEPT), a project funded by the Sloan Foundation. These courses are the equivalent of education on demand: You can go to your workstation, log on, and take a course on your own schedule. The logical extension of asynchronous education is being explored by the Stanford Center for Professional Development, which offers continuing engineering education courses to companies and individuals at remote corporate locations.

Predictions are risky, especially ones dealing with hopes that technology is an easy fix for our current problems. Storerooms full of unused equipment attest to the difficulty in changing established patterns of interaction. Nevertheless, I think a big change is in the wind. There is substance beneath the hype, and we are building the foundations here at the School of Engineering.

Stay logged on. The best is yet to come.

John L. Hennessy
Dean