David P. Reed

Who is David P. Reed?

David Patrick Reed is an American computer scientist, educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known for a number of significant contributions to computer networking and wireless communications networks.

He was involved in the early development of TCP/IP, and was the designer of the User Datagram Protocol, though he finds this title "a little embarrassing". He was also one of the authors of the original paper about the end-to-end principle, End-to-end arguments in system design, published in 1984.

He is also known for Reed's law, his assertion that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.

Reed is an Adjunct Professor at the MIT Media Lab in the Viral Communications group and is one of six principal architects of the Croquet project. He is also on the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard.