Gregory G. Finn

Education

Gregory Finn received the B.S. degree in Physics in 1973 from Brandeis University and the M.S. in Computer Science in 1978 from the University of Southern California.

Experience

In the distant age when integrated circuits were a rarity, Greg developed extensive systems programming experience. In 1977 he was completely responsible for the configuration and installation of Univ. of Southern California's first timesharing system for the Computer Science Dept., a DECsystem-10 mainframe, which then became the principal teaching and research computer. Previously, students at USC had had to use punch cards, which he considered very sad.

Greg joined ISI full-time in 1979 and worked for Jon Postel as a researcher until 1991. Jon Postel was one of the ten or so individuals who founded the field of computer networking.   During this period Greg developed for Jon the first IP protocol suite for Xerox workstations, a typesetting driver for initial Xerox laser bitmapped printers and was a principal developer of the first multimedia email system.  In 1991 he became principal developer for the ATOMIC project under Danny Cohen.  ATOMIC is believed to have been the first functional gigabit LAN, capable of combined send/receive speed of nearly 800 Mb/s.

Greg later became project leader for the Netstation project, the goal of which was to demonstrate that gigabit LANs allowed a workstation's primary peripheral devices to be attached to a network via IP/TCP rather than to a specialized internal bus.   This demonstration required ground-up creation of workstation prototype, which included design and build of a motherboard, display functionality and so on.  The workstation demonstrated reliable transmission of 30K/datagrams-per-second, plus their acknowledgements between hosts.   At the time this was important, since it proved that IP protocols were not a serious obstacle to high-performance data transmission.   That plus the project's demonstation of the first functioning IP-based SCSI disk driver was a key step in what later became the IP-SCSI effort in the IETF.

Currently, his research interests lie in the area of cooperation of wearable wireless computers. He is the project leader of CiSoft 'Personal Node' research effort which seeks to develop methods that utilize wearable computers and wireless sensors to improve worker safety. This work is supported by Chevron Corp. A set of general background slides on the Personal Node project may be found here PTE-589_lecture_slides.ppt.

Past research was in the area of virtual computer networks, in particular mechanisms for their automated creation.
To that end he developed a language for defining virtual networks that is used by both the Xbone and Dynabone projects.

He also has demonstrated that virtual networking can be applied widely and generally to enable application domains, such as geographic addressing and regional broadcast, that cannot be  supported by the current Internet (see the preliminary draft GeoNet).

Early reports dealing with geographic routing and routing algorithm attack vulnerabilities may be found at:

Reducing the Vulnerability of Dynamic Computer Networks

Routing and Addressing Problems In Large Metropolitan-scale Internetworks