Jonathan Andrew Crowcroft, FRS, FREng is the Marconi Professor of Communications Systems in the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge and the Chair of the Programme Committee at the Alan Turing Institute.

Professor Crowcroft graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1979, then gained a Master of Science degree in Computing in 1981 and PhD in 1993, both from University College London.

Professor Crowcroft joined the University of Cambridge in 2001, prior to which he was Professor of Networked Systems at University College London in the Computer Science Department. After he stepped down from UCL, his professorship was assumed by his former PhD student Mark Handley. He is currently a Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge.

Jon had contributions to a number of successful start-up projects. He has been a member of the Scientific Council of IMDEA Networks Institute since 2007. He was also on advisory board of Max Planck Institute for Software Systems .

Jon had written, edited and co-authored a number of books and publications which have been adopted internationally in academic courses, including TCP/IP & Linux Protocol Implementation: Systems Code for the Linux Internet, Internetworking Multimedia and Open Distributed Systems.

Professor Crowcroft has also done research in theoretical network science, particularly in the area of Turing switches, and he has suggested to replace general-purpose computers acting as network switches with specially-built hardware dedicated to packet switching, as well as using optical technology for the same purpose.

Awards and honours

Professor Crowcroft was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2013. His nomination reads: “Professor Jon Crowcroft is distinguished for his many seminal contributions to the development of the Internet. His work on satellite link interconnection techniques in the 1980s paved the way for rural broadband; his work on standards for video and voice on IP networks helped extend the Internet to multimedia; and in the 2000s he founded the field of opportunistic networking”.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, as well as a Fellow of the IEEE (2004). He was a member of the Internet Architecture Board 1996-2002, and attended most of the first 50 IETF meetings.

Professor Crowcroft was general chair for the ACM SIGCOMM conference between 1995 and 1999, and received the SIGCOMM Award in 2009. The award to Crowcroft was “for his pioneering contributions to multimedia and group communications, for his endless enthusiasm and energy, for all of the creative ideas he has so freely shared with so many in the networking community, and for always being outside the box”.

Recommended books

Professor Crowcroft has a very large list of recommended books. As most of them are nonetechnical we are going to list all of them here with some of his notations and comments.