Jeff M. Jaffe

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Jeffrey M. Jaffe, (born 21 July, 1954) is a computer science researcher, public policy expert, and technology executive across multiple industries, including computing systems, telecommunications, software, and web. He is also a religious philosopher and author of a new approach to the text of the Hebrew Bible.

Education[edit]

Jaffe received a BS in Mathematics (1976), MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (1977) and PhD in Computer Science (1979), all from MIT.

Research at TJ Watson Research Center[edit]

During the 1980s, while working at IBM’s famed TJ Watson Research Center, Jaffe’s computer science research focused on parallel and distributed algorithms. He published more than 30 papers (in refereed journals) in that decade. He is most noted for his work (with Frank Moss) on efficient decentralized routing algorithms.^[1], his work with (Israel Cidon and Moshe Sidi) on distributed deadlock resolution ^[2], and his work on bottleneck flow control ^[3]. The latter was reprinted by the IEEE in a book highlighting the 50 most important papers in 50 years of Communications and Networking Research ^[4]. Based largely on this work, Jaffe was one of the first individuals to be named both an IEEE Fellow (1988)^[5] and ACM Fellow (1996)^[6].

Career and Policy Experience[edit]

IBM (1990s)[edit]

In the 1990s, Jaffe shifted from research to technology executive roles.

As the VP of IBM Research, he was responsible for all Systems and Software Research across all of IBM’s research facilities. Later he became Corporate Vice President of Technology, a position advising the corporation on the adequacy of IBM’s technology portfolio; and exploring emerging technologies that could either represent new business opportunities, or pose risks to existing businesses. He also led IBM’s SecureWay product line, a significant set of security and networking products.

In parallel, Jaffe established himself as a public policy expert. In 1996, he was appointed by President Clinton to the Advisory Committee for the Presidential Council for Critical Infrastructure Protection ^[7]. He was also the lead CTO for the CTO Council of the Computer Systems Policy Project – an affiliation of Computer system CEOs who advocated for public policy changes on export control and encryption. He also served on the NAE’s Computer Science and Telecommunication Board.

Lucent / Bell Labs (early 2000s)[edit]

During AT&T’s status as a regulated monopoly, a tax on phone bills supported the storied research activities of Bell Labs. Lucent then inherited Bell Labs as a result of the AT&T breakup. In the competitive telecom environment of the late 1990s, it was no longer practical for Lucent to maintain Bell Labs’ exclusive focus on fundamental science. In 2000, Lucent recruited Jaffe to lead research efforts that would align fundamental research with business goals. Jaffe served as President of Bell Labs Research and Advanced Technologies from 2001-2005.

Shortly after Jaffe’s arrival at Lucent, an industry-wide "telecoms crash" led to the collapse of many firms and valuations. Lucent’s stock price, for example, dropped from $65 in September 1999 to $0.76 by September 2002. This trend redefined Jaffe’s role: to make Bell Labs affordable in the face of a major financial downturn.

To staunch the bleeding, Jaffe secured alternative funding for Bell Labs Research. Bell Labs increased federal research funding from agencies such as DARPA and NSF. Jaffe also worked with New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey to create a unique public/private partnership called the New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium ^[8]. Through this partnership, Bell Labs was able to make available its advanced fabrication facilities to the public, with much of the cost supported by state funding.

Novell[edit]

In 2005, Jaffe moved from telecoms to software when he became the Executive Vice President and CTO of Novell, Inc. In those roles he was responsible for both the technical direction of the company and all business units.

This included leading an Open Source business: one of Novell’s four business units was Suse Linux – the second largest commercial Linux distribution. Jaffe led negotiations that resulted in a Novell partnership with Microsoft (total value of approximately $500M), a portion of which included Microsoft agreeing to be a re-distributor of Suse Linux ^[9]. There was some controversy about this agreement among the open source community because attached to the commercial agreement was a covenant by Microsoft not to sue Linux customers for patent infringement. Some in the open source community felt that such a limited agreement not to sue went against GPL principles ^[10].

CEO of World Wide Web Consortium (2010s to 2023)[edit]

In 2010, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), recruited Jaffe as CEO ^[11]. In this Web community leadership position, Jaffe set out to broaden the scope, mission, and impact of the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web.

Some of the steps that Jaffe took to grow the W3C community included:

• Innovation is a precursor to standardization. In 2011 Jaffe (working with Ian Jacobs) helped make it easier for the global Web developer community to bring innovations to W3C and nurture them within a new agile platform called Community Groups ^[12]. By 2022 there were over 15,000 developers that worked in 350 Community Groups involved in cross-community innovation.

• Recognizing the importance of China as a source of web developer expertise, in 2013, Jaffe further globalized W3C by adding a host in China ^[13].

• With web technologies playing a critical role in diverse industries (e.g. entertainment, telecommunications, fintech, and publishing), Jaffe broadened W3C’s efforts by addressing web technology needs for vertical industries. An illustration of this success (in the entertainment industry) is three technical Emmy awards won by W3C in 2016 (captioning) ^[14], 2019 (streaming) ^[15], and 2022 (fonts) ^[16].

The net of all of these efforts was a growth in Membership of 50% in ten years, and a growth in the number of participants by a factor of 10.

Controversies[edit]

Where diverse stakeholders have different goals in evolving the web, W3C cannot avoid controversy. Two areas stand out where Jaffe helped to manage conflicting objectives.

During the process of standardizing the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) specification, free software advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) were critical of Jaffe, Berners-Lee, and W3C. They argued that providing common interfaces to DRM-protected content would expand the use of such content which they were opposed to. Supporters of EME within W3C argued that EME would improve the experience for content already widely available on the web through plug-ins. The caused a substantial debate in W3C, but in the end, these interfaces were included in W3C Recommendations ^[17]. In 2004, a schism in web standards development occurred when developers from key web browser companies such as Apple and Mozilla formed a new group, WHATWG, to work on certain web standards ^[18]. Jaffe began to address this schism when he arrived at W3C in 2010, but the situation intensified, when, in 2017, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla formalized a governance structure for the WHATWG ^[19]. Jaffe worked with the WHATWG leadership to resolve the years-long dispute through an agreement on a collaboration approach between the two organizations ^[20].

Additional Policy Roles[edit]

After his initial experiences at IBM, Jaffe continued to work as a public policy executive in different industries. At Bell Labs, he worked with the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), to highlight how, with the breakup of AT&T, a new model was required for telecommunications research funding. At Novell and W3C, he was involved in issues related to open source and patents. Also, at W3C, he ensured that the web technology stack would support broad societal needs such as global language needs, accessibility, privacy, and security. As a consequence, when the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) asked its publication, “The Bridge” to forecast the next 50 years of innovation, Jaffe was invited (together with Judy Brewer) to write about these needs ^[21].

Religious Philosophy Activities[edit]

In parallel to his technical work, in the last several years Jaffe has also worked as a religious philosopher. In Orthodox Judaism, the Biblical text is used to explain a way of life for Jews – based on performing certain good deeds (or Mitzvot). Jaffe’s approach is to use that same text, and explain how Judaism interprets the Bible as a way of life for all of humanity – based on the same traditional sources. This work culminated in the recent publication (by Gefen Press) of his work entitled: “Genesis: A Torah for All Nations” ^[22]

References[edit]

External links[edit]

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