Today, the internet is a familiar device used to send letters to friends and colleagues, catch up on breaking news, or watch movies and play video games. But amid its innumerable applications, we don’t often consider the amount of work needed to make these conveniences possible at the click of a mouse.
Professor Alberto Leon-Garcia of U of T’s department of electrical and computer engineering has played a large role in keeping technology up-to-date with our ever-increasing internet demands. His work looks into how we manage the input, output, and interpretation of the tangle of information from text, voice, and video sources circulating the internet.
“What’s so exciting about networks today is that so many applications are possible and the expectation is that the number of applications will grow much larger and more sophisticated,” explained Leon-Garcia, this year’s winner of the Thomas W. Easdie Medal from the Royal Society of Canada.
The internet’s evolution has brought many traditional technologies online. The telephone, for instance, is moving into internet territory, with programs such as Skype allowing us to make phone calls from our computers. Even cable television is infiltrating the realm of cyberspace.
“My research has to do with integrating networks, how to manage these networks to allow these flows [of information] to coexist,” said Leon-Garcia.
Devices called switches, which act like interchanges for crowded information traffic, are what allow efficient data management on the net.
Leon-Garcia is eager to solve the problem of simultaneously controlling vast amounts of data being transferred from varying sources without compromising speed, and accommodating the growing volume of that information. In 1999, Leon-Garcia started a company named AcceLight with eight PhD students. Employing novel technology, he built a switch that would fulfill these purposes.
“There were quite a few innovations in [the switch]. One of which was to use optics in the fabric [of the switch, which were] quite leading-edge. The advantage of optical technology is that the speeds that it can handle are vast.”
The fruit of his labour was an industry-leading terabit switch, capable of handling the huge amount of information experts predict we will encounter online just five years from now.
“So we sort of ran way to the front [of the technological race],” Leon-Garcia joked.
Leon-Garcia’s books on probability and networking have been translated into in multiple languages and are used by students across the globe to understand the workings of the internet.
