Brian Carpenter

Brian Edward Carpenter (born 30 May 1946) is a British Internet engineer and a former chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), and the Internet Society. He took three years off of his CERN career to teach undergraduate computer science at Massey University in New Zealand. from 2007 until his retirement in 2012. After his retirement, he spent a year as a visiting professor at the Computer Laboratory of Cambridge University. Since then he has been an honorary academic at The University of Auckland and a consultant for Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.

In 2013, Carpenter published a professional memoir called Network Geeks: How They Built the Internet.

Contributions to Internet technology Carpenter's research interests include Internet protocols, especially the networking and routing layers.

Carpenter served from March 1994 to March 2002 on the Internet Architecture Board, which he chaired for five years. In 1996, he edited an important memo on the Architectural Principles of the Internet. He has worked on IPv6 and on differentiated services and served as the DiffServ working group chair. He also served as a Trustee of the Internet Society, and was Chairman of its Board of Trustees for two years until June 2002. In March 2005, he became IETF Chair, a position he held until March 2007.

Selected publications

AM Turing's ACE Report of 1946 and Other Papers, Vol. 10 of Charles Babbage Institute Reprint Series for the History of Computing, B.E. Carpenter, R.W. Doran (eds), MIT Press, 1986.

"Turing’s Zeitgeist", B.E. Carpenter, R.W. Doran, Chapter 22 in The Turing Guide, Jack Copeland et al. (eds.), , Oxford University Press, 2017, pp 223–231.