This year’s heroes of IT

In literature and film, heroes are hard to miss. They stride through nearly every scene of the summer potboiler Troy, for example. Real-life heroes are fewer in number and harder to spot. Yet their impact on history can be as profound as that of great warriors, as this week’s cover story shows.

The occasion is InfoWorld Innovators 2004, the third edition of the annual salute our editors give to the scientists and engineers whose work is changing IT (see “Innovators 2004,” page 46). This year’s honorees are a diverse bunch, and they drew inspiration from varied sources.

Dan Boneh and Matt Franklin, for instance, probably can attribute their success, at least in part, to an act of hubris. The two university-based scientists — Boneh is at Stanford University; Franklin is at the University of California, Davis — were angling for a government grant. To get it, they committed themselves to solving a classic challenge of public key cryptography.

In hindsight, Boneh told InfoWorld Test Center Senior Analyst P.J. Connolly, “It was sort of foolish to write a proposal saying that we were going to solve this 18-year-old problem. We … had no clue how we were going to do it.”

Yet Boneh and Franklin managed to come up with a method for generating public/private key pairs from simple alphanumeric strings, such as an e-mail address or phone number. It’s even possible to encrypt a message to a person using his or her public key even before he or she has generated the private key needed to unlock the message. That’s a significant advance over earlier systems in which both parties had to be registered with a key server before such a message could be sent.

Verity’s Micah Dubinko took as his challenge the deceptively complex problem of rendering input forms for the Internet. Dubinko edited the requirements document for the W3C’s XForms working group. It establishes a standard method for representing such forms whether the output device is a typical PC or a tiny PDA or cell phone — a major advance.

Bram Cohen, now at computer game publisher Valve, earned an award for his creation of BitTorrent, the highly successful peer-to-peer file-transfer program. And David Perlmutter of Intel and Norman Rohrer of IBM led their companies’ efforts to develop, respectively, the low-power Centrino mobile-computing platform and the PowerPC 970FX chip.

InfoWorld honors them all, in addition to other Innovators profiled in our cover story, which was edited by Associate Editor Jack McCarthy. And don’t miss the seven up-and-comers described in the accompanying Innovators to Watch in 2005.