Having been interested in management and measurement of the Internet since I worked on an early prototype of HP Openview, KC Claffy is a good subject for my Ada Lovelace day posting.

KC makes the Internet visible - taking what is at base a vast signaling system composed of on-off states in optics, silicon and copper, and representing it in pictures which allow people to reason about the consequences of changes.

Whois map

Doing this requires access to data measuring Internet traffic - and discovering that much of the data which is required to understand the traffic trends is either not collected, or not available. The Internet is critical infrastructure, yet the people making decisions which affect it, particularly in the public policy space, don't have the necessary information with which to make reasonable decisions. KC presented on this topic to the Department of Congress and the Federal Communications Commission - and, perhaps as a consequence, there are data collection requirements for the recipients of broadband stimulus funds.

"She is the principal investigator for the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) which is based at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and provides tools and analyses to promote a robust, scalable global Internet infrastructure. As a research scientist at SDSC her research interests include the collection, analysis, and visualization of workload, routing, topology, performance, and economic data on the Internet. She has been at SDSC since 1991 and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC San Diego."

Updated (9 Dec 2010) link to KC's profile.

References
Profile
Traffic Management needs presentation(pdf)
CAIDA images
About Ada Lovelace