Role Computer scientist Name David Reed | Alma mater MIT Fields Computer Science Doctoral advisor Jerry Saltzer | |
 | ||
Born January 31, 1952 (age 72) ( 1952-01-31 ) Institutions Lotus SoftwareMITHewlett-PackardInterval Research Thesis Processor multiplexing in a layered operating system (1976) Residence Needham, Massachusetts, United States Known for Internet protocol suite, User Datagram Protocol, Multiversion concurrency control | ||
David Patrick Reed (born January 31, 1952) is an American computer scientist, educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known for a number of significant contributions to computer networking and wireless communications networks.
He was involved in the early development of TCP/IP, and was the designer of the User Datagram Protocol (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, his assertion that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network. (It was first cited in "The Law of the Pack," Harvard Business Review (February 2001) pp 23–4.)
From 2003–2010, Reed was an adjunct professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he co-led the 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, Andreas Raab, David A. Smith, and Mark McCahill). He is also on the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard.