Dr. J.F. (Jeff) Rulifson
Director, Networking and Security Center
Sun Microsystems Laboratories
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Chairman, The Open Group

Jeff Rulifson is an award-winning scientist and Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery with over thirty years experience in computer technology. As Director of the Technology Development Group at SMCC, Rulifson has advanced development projects in high resolution video, video compression, very low cost gigabit chip interconnects, distributed shared memory, security, and nomadic networking.

Previously, Rulifson managed window systems and toolkits, graphics and imaging platform software, multi-media, applications and Sun technical publications. Rulifson came to Sun from Syntelligence, where he held the position of manager of banking products. Before that, he held the positions of engineering manager at ROLM Corporation, group manager at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and mathematician at SRI International.

Rulifson holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Washington, and is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Jeff was awarded the Association for   Computing Machinery's Software System Award in 1990 "for pioneering work on augmenting human intellect with hypertext, outline processors, and video conferencing that was implemented in the NLS System (On-Line System [1968])." The award was shared with Douglas C. Engelbart and William K. English. In 1994, along with thirty-four other computer scientists, Jeff was honored by Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) as an ARPANET Pioneer for his early work that led to the Internet. The work contributed to "packet networking and the concept of a common language for communications to allow dissimilar systems to communicate." rfc3 established the first set of documentation standards for the original ARPANET Network Working Group. rfc5 was a proposal for a method of sending applets over the ARPANET to provide real-time user interactions over the ARPANET.

Jeff Rulifison is Chairman of The Open Group.