Professor Jennifer Rexford, chair of the computer science department, the Gordon Y. S. Wu Professor in Engineering, and a veteran of industry, talks about innovating the inside of the Internet itself, which she likens to “changing the wheels of a car while it is being driven.” 

Rexford reviews her work and the work of many of her colleagues across disciplines to continue to make the Internet “more secure, more efficient, more reliable and more cost-effective.” She notes that one of her biggest concerns when she left industry and moved into academia was losing touch with the pain of network administrators; consequently, the academic research she likes to do has been highly collaborative with companies. Professor Rexford also highlights the differences between how academia and industry approach problems and how each brings unique value to a topic.

Jennifer Rexford addressed, via teleconference from Princeton, the Spring 2018 conference of UIDP, an organization that brings companies and universities together to improve academic-industry collaborations. The four-day event was co-hosted in Silicon Valley by Princeton's Office of Corporate Engagement and Cisco and was the largest ever UIDP meeting. More than 300 attended to examine “Building U-I Partnerships in the Technology Ecosystem.”

Chip Hay, a member of Princeton's corporate engagement team, introduced Professor Rexford.