Marconi Foundation at Columbia University Honors Inventors of Public Key Cryptography:"Sealing Wax" of the Information Age is Key to Internet Privacy.

Business Editors

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 10, 2000

The two winners of the prestigious $100,000 Marconi Fellowship

Foundation are Californians, a Stanford University professor

and a Sun Microsystems distinguished scientist.

Two innovators whose mathematical formulations developed nearly 25 years ago unleashed the key to private communications and secure transactions on the Internet will receive the 26th annual Marconi International Fellowship award October 10 for their breakthrough invention and activism in the cause of privacy rights. Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman will share the $100,000 fellowship prize honoring advances in telecommunications for humanitarian benefit, to be presented at Columbia University in New York City, the academic home of the Marconi International Fellowship Foundation.

The foundation was established in memory of Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of wireless transmission that led to the development of radio, by his daughter Gioia Marconi Braga in 1974, 100 years after Marconi's birth. Since then, the foundation has been spotting eclectic innovators in telecommunications whose work has advanced the public good.

The Marconi award is the foremost in the field of telecommunications and information technology. To recognize this important prize in the field, the Marconi Foundation will host a forum on Tuesday, Oct. 10 with notable representatives from industry, academia and government in the Schapiro Center of the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science on the Columbia campus (Davis Auditorium, Room 412 at 530 West 120th Street). Dr. George Heilmeier, inventor, engineer, former head of Bellcore, (subsequently Telcordia Technologies) and a founding member of the Marconi Foundation, will speak on "From Pots to Pans.com: Thoughts and Predictions About Information Systems for this Decade and Beyond." His presentation will be followed by discussion from a panel of experts and the audience. A reception honoring this year's Marconi Fellows will follow the discussion. In 1976, Diffie and Hellman published "New Directions in Cryptography" describing their protocol as public key cryptography, which enables secure electronic transactions and has been called the "sealing wax" of the information age. The Diffie-Hellman key agreement, which depends on a discrete logarithm for its security, was fundamental to the development of the world of e-commerce. Their invention protects global confidence in both the privacy and authenticity of messages on the Internet. The two scientists, working in the relative isolation of academia at Stanford University, were able to conceive an idea of revolutionary import that had escaped thousands of researchers working in secret government agencies. Their discovery opened the field of cryptography to unclassified academic study. Diffie, now a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, has spent his career pursuing the theory and application of cryptography. Hellman, Professor Emeritus at Stanford, in addition to his work in the field, has been concerned with the ethics of technological development.

Both men have become champions of individual privacy rights. Despite vehement demands from the FBI to Congress to keep cryptography in the domain of secret agencies, Diffie has taken a strong stance on opposing limitations on cryptography for business and personal use, and is co-author of the book Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption. Hellman was the co-editor with Anatoly Gromyko, the long-time Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, of Emerging New Thinking, which focused on technology and war and peace issues.

Before her death in 1996, Marconi's daughter, Gioia Braga wrote, "Our purpose was to establish a program that would recognize creative work done by scientists and engineers who continue to advance the frontiers of knowledge in the field of communications in the Marconi tradition and that are as dedicated as he was to applying their discoveries to the benefit of mankind." Most scientists who receive the fellowship have demonstrated a strong commitment to the public good. Often, too, the winners have bridged science and the world of arts and letters. The 1982 fellowship recipient, Arthur Clarke, won because he was the first to specify the potential and technical requirements for using satellites in telecommunications. Also an accomplished science fiction writer, Clarke's credits include "2001: A Space Odyssey," for which he shared an Oscar nomination with film director Stanley Kubrick in 1969. This year, the foundation named John Jay Iselin, a well-known New York figure whose own career has fused the worlds of arts and sciences, to the position of president. Iselin holds degrees in history, literature, law and government. In the 1960's, he served as a national affairs correspondent and editor at Newsweek and as a correspondent for the Congressional Quarterly. For 16 years, he was the general manager and president of WNET (Channel 13), where he oversaw the production of such programs as the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour; Currents; and Live From Lincoln Center. In 1988, he entered the world of science, becoming the 10th president of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, one of the country's premiere art, architecture and engineering schools. With his arrival at Columbia, Iselin received a joint appointment with the Graduate School of Journalism. Iselin takes a wide-lens view of the invention of the radio and what it means for the 21st century. "We went through a period, after the advent of the radio, when we focused on wired technology," said Iselin. "But now we're looking once again to the wireless world, and we have the invention of the radio, modest as it may seem now, to thank for that. I'm pleased to be here, in a place that honors the past while recognizing the wave of the future." The Foundation also has a history of pinpointing up-and-comers in the telecom world. In 1990, for example, the Marconi Foundation awarded the fellowship to Andrew Viterbi, co-founder of Qualcomm. Nine years later, the company would round out the last year of the century with its stock having shot up 2,600 percent in just one year. The history of the foundation itself seems to reflect the diversity of its ideals. The Foundation was first at the Aspen Institute, then later moved to Brooklyn Polytechnic University. In 1995, it found its home at Columbia, at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In the past, awards have been given out by such luminaries as Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh (1976); and Chief Justice Warren Burger (1987). The awards are presented by Columbia President George Rupp every other year, and handed out at other institutions around the globe in the alternate year. Since the death of Marconi's daughter in 1996, the chair of the Foundation has been Martin Meyerson, Emeritus President and University Professor of the University of Pennsylvania. He has been the President of the Swiss-American Foundation for the International Exchange of Scientific and Cultural Information by Telecommunications and for nearly 20 years he was the overseas governor of the International Research Centre for Environmental Studies in London. For many years Meyerson was the director of the Aspen Institute, where the Marconi Foundation was first housed.