David Patrick Reed (born January 31, 1952) is an American computer scientist, educated at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

, known for a number of significant contributions to computer networking and wireless communications networks. He was involved in the early development of

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

, and was the designer of the

User Datagram Protocol In computer networking, the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is one of the core communication protocols of the Internet protocol suite used to send messages (transported as datagrams in packets) to other hosts on an Internet Protocol (IP) network. ...

(UDP), though he finds this title "a little embarrassing". He was also one of the authors of the original paper about the end-to-end principle, ''End-to-end arguments in system design'', published in 1984. He is also known for

Reed's law Reed's law is the assertion of David P. Reed that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network. The reason for this is that the number of possible sub-groups of network partici ...

, his assertion that the utility of large

network Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

s, particularly

social network A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for an ...

s, can scale

exponentially Exponential may refer to any of several mathematical topics related to exponentiation, including: *Exponential function, also: **Matrix exponential, the matrix analogue to the above * Exponential decay, decrease at a rate proportional to value *Exp ...

with the size of the network. From 2003–2010, Reed was an

adjunct professor An adjunct professor is a type of academic appointment in higher education who does not work at the establishment full-time. The terms of this appointment and the job security of the tenure vary in different parts of the world, however the genera ...

at the MIT Media Lab, where he co-led th
Viral Communications
group and the Communication Futures program. He currently serves as a senior vice president of the Chief Scientist Group at SAP Labs. He is one of six principal architects of the Croquet project (along with Alan Kay,

Julian Lombardi Julian Lombardi (born November 11, 1956) is an American inventor, author, educator, and computer scientist known for his work with socio-computational systems, scalable virtual world technologies, and in the design and deployment of deeply col ...

Andreas Raab Squeak is an object-oriented, class-based, and reflective programming language. It was derived from Smalltalk-80 by a group that included some of Smalltalk-80's original developers, initially at Apple Computer, then at Walt Disney Imagineering, ...

, David A. Smith, and Mark McCahill). He is also on the advisory board of

TTI/Vanguard TTI/Vanguard is an advanced technology research membership for senior-level executives. Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, TTI/Vanguard explores emerging and potentially disruptive technologies and their global impact. Four times annually, ...

. His 1978 dissertation introduced

multiversion concurrency control Multiversion concurrency control (MCC or MVCC), is a concurrency control method commonly used by database management systems to provide concurrent access to the database and in programming languages to implement transactional memory. Description W ...

(MVCC). MVCC is a concurrency control method commonly used by

database management system In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases span ...

s to provide concurrent access to the database and in programming languages to implement

transactional memory In computer science and engineering, transactional memory attempts to simplify concurrent programming by allowing a group of load and store instructions to execute in an atomic way. It is a concurrency control mechanism analogous to database transa ...

.refs
Clojure. Retrieved on 2013-09-18.

References

External links

*
Reed's Locus

Biography

Naming and synchronization in a decentralized computer system (Reed's thesis, 1978)
Living people American computer scientists MIT School of Architecture and Planning faculty Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni 1952 births MIT Media Lab people {{US-compu-bio-stub