President Bush to appoint Akamai Chief Scientist to Information Technology Advisory Committee CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - May 12, 2003 - Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), a provider of services that enable the world's leading enterprises and government agencies to extend and control their e-business infrastructure, today announced that Akamai Chief Scientist Dr. Tom Leighton is to be appointed as a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) for a two-year term.
The President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) was established by Executive Order and is chartered by Congress under the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991 (P. L. 102-194) and the Next Generation Internet Act of 1998 (P. L. 105-305). PITAC will help guide the Administration's efforts to accelerate the development and adoption of information technologies vital for American prosperity in the 21st century.
The members of PITAC, who are leading IT experts from industry and academia, will provide the President with expert, independent advice on maintaining America's preeminence in advanced information technologies, including such important elements of the national IT infrastructure as high performance computing, large-scale networking, and high assurance software and systems design.
Dr. Leighton co-founded Akamai in September 1998. As one of the world's pre-eminent authorities on algorithms for network applications, Leighton's work behind establishing Akamai was based on recognizing that a solution to freeing up Web congestion could be found in applied mathematics and algorithms. Akamai has demonstrated this through the creation of the world's largest distributed computing platform that dynamically routes content and applications across a network of more than 15,000 servers.
A Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT, he has served as the Head of the Algorithms Group in MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science since its inception in 1996.
Dr. Leighton holds numerous patents involving cryptography, digital rights management, and algorithms for networks, and has published more than 100 research papers. His leading text on parallel algorithms and architectures has been translated into several languages.
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