Jennifer Rexford, Gordon Y. S. Wu Professor of Engineering and Chair of the Computer Science Department at Princeton University, gave a Distinguished Lecture titled “Networks Capable of Change”, at Técnico, this Thursday, June 6th.

“Changing the network is important to make the Internet more reliable, secure, performant, and cost-effective”, said Jennifer Rexford, who also considers that this is a challenge that all science communicators want to overcome. The speaker spoke about the programmable networks throughout the last 25 years and highlighted the importance of “being in permanent contact with the reality, trying to shape the future”.

Active networks, routing protocols, internet architecture, network control points, Openflow, performance measurement and the challenges that came with the interactive applications, were topics addressed by the Princeton professor.

Professor Jennifer Rexford shared an important part of her life, when she moved from Michigan to Princeton. In 2005, she started working at Planet Lab – a global platform for deploying and evaluating network services that simulates tens of thousands of virtual users, develops and tests prototypes of applications and services for the network.

“Interdisciplinary collaboration is essential. It’s important to be aware of the different challenges of each network and, above all, it’s important to understand that it’s not worth fighting against what we can’t change”, said professor Jennifer Rexford.